An unusual joint art exhibition by two outstanding Maltese artists – painter Harry Alden and sculptor Ġanni Bonnici – was inaugurated at Palazzo de La Salle.

Established, veteran artists and educators who have had a considerable influence on their students with their vision and concepts

Alden and Bonnici are established, veteran artists and educators who have had a considerable influence on their students with their vision and concepts. They both studied abroad after long years of practical work at the local School of Art, have carried out public and Church commissions, have exhibited locally and abroad, and been honoured for their singular contribution to art.

Alden’s art is formal, impersonal, linear and disciplined. He transforms space into defined shapes and forms. Yet, though unemotional, it is imbued with sentiment. There is harmony and music in his choice of colours.

Bonnici’s sculpture is also characterised by its bold, rustic, primitive, and frugal idiom. Its strength lies in its dynamic forms and volumes, in its forceful frontality. His realism is basedon verismo, which he studiedin Rome under AlessandroMonteleone.

Inspired by primitive art, Bonnici avoids unnecessary detail; basing his strength on simplicity, he projects mass and shape and articulates the ‘force within’.

Alden obtained his diploma under his tutor Bridget Riley at the College of Arts, Croydon. The fourth year he dedicated to textile design and printing, etching and line printing. This final year left an indelible mark on the artist, as there is an affinity between his disciplined and meditative temperament – clean, impeccable, aiming towards perfection, graphic art, and printing with due emphasis on line. Alden’s concept and dialectic is based on the ‘hard edge’ technique he has experimented with for the past 50 years.

Bonnici’s artistic vision and concept belong naturally to the modern Italian sculptural movement. His thesis on Medardo Rosso (1858-1947), L’Impressionismo nella scultura for his diploma course in Rome gave the student ample time to ponder and choose what direction to take.

The revolution in modern sculpture was a result of a confrontation between Medardo Rosso and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) after 1898. Rodin achieves spirituality through realism: the articulation of solid volumes and heavy forms, while Rosso achieves it through fantasy, emotion and mysticism, through melting, soft shapes.

Bonnici took the plunge and re­sor­ted to Rodin’s bold forms. The frontal and archaic nuances in his realistic style are due to factors and influences that affected the Modern Italian School. Modern art has been repeatedly injected with studies of primitive Roman and Etruscan art.

In 1975 Bonnici’s monumental Christ in cold cast bronze was inaugurated at Santa Luċija parish church while the Independence monument in bronze at the Mall, Floriana, was unveiled in 1989.

In May 1989, Alden’s mural was inaugurated at the Gian Franġisk Abela Junior College, Msida – an enormous decorative mural that elaborates about man’s knowledge in the scientific and artistic fields with explicit reference to the subjects taught at the college.

The contrast in the two men’s character surfaces in their art: Alden’s formal and impersonal in extravagant colour; Bonnici’s in monumental bold forms and volumes in an expressive realism.

A full colour catalogue is available.The exhibition is showing at the Malta Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce at 119, Republic Street, Valletta.

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