Works by Tradate artists, on their way to New York and China

The works belonging to the Boga Brothers are travelling the world. The movement that the businessmen from Tradate created in the 1980s, “Quando il pensiero supera il gesto” (“When thought exceeds deed”), consists of a series of works, paintings and installations, that set out to look at the history of the world from a different perspective, also by means of the contradictions that have characterised ideologies.

These works, which are going to be exhibited in the museum that is currently being built between Tradate and Locate Varesino, are travelling around the world; 10 are about to be shipped to a museum in New York, and 28, to China, to the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Beijing.

The works are provocative, where the actions of man are exhibited in the contexts of history, time, and occasionally revisionism. Thus, the ideologies that created the movement become the central figures, like the reproduction of the gates of the Nazi concentration camps, or the huge copy of Gandhi’s glasses, and many others.

In the manifesto of the movement, the Boga Brothers, themselves, explain the reason for this form of expression, which began in the 1980s. “By ‘thought’, we mean the idea that is represented, in varying degrees, and under different aspects, as a fundamental part of Living, that is responsible and present, in every instance. ‘Thought’ relates to the adherence to common ideas that are thought in unison. The main idea is the transcendent unity of and in the shapes, of and in the colours, of and in the contents, of and in the everyday living of religions and of shapes, the great variety of which we relate to when we come into contact with earthly, but above all heavenly, things.”

The Boga Brothers continue, “Art is a phenomenon that has existed from the birth of man, and it must live through the centuries for it to be true art, otherwise it dies at the moment it is created, like the view of art as ‘transgression’, which leads to art that is not personal expression, but only a commercial phenomenon, almost of a ‘corner shop’. For these thinkers, the mixing of religions and various religious shapes that we see in many areas of the world today, can be nothing but the falsification that proceeds from the encroachment of times and places that do not belong to the shapes that invade others.”