The exhibition
From May 30 to September 6, 2026, the MUDA exhibition center in Albissola Marina and the Ceramics Museum of Savona will host the exhibition Fuoco Ritrovato (Rediscovered Fire). A comprehensive survey dedicated to the recent ceramic production of Ugo Nespolo, curated by Riccardo Zelatore.
Promoted by the Fondazione Museo della Ceramica di Savona ETS—an institutional body of the Fondazione De Mari CR Savona—and the Municipality of Albissola Marina, the exhibition features over thirty previously unseen works, created at the historic Ceramiche Pierluca manufactory in Albissola.
Ceramic as dialectic and medium
Nespolo’s ceramics combine historical avant-gardes, Pop Art, and Italian craftsmanship, reviving the total lesson of Albisola’s Futurism in a strictly contemporary synthesis.
In tracing the coordinates of Ugo Nespolo’s theoretical horizon, it clearly emerges how his engagement with ceramic matter shapes up as a true inner necessity within his journey, a crucial knot in his artistic ontology. From this perspective, the modeled clay becomes a dialectical synthesis and a space where the legacy of historical avant-gardes, the lexicon of Pop Art, and Italian craftsmanship converge.
This new cycle of works offers clear evidence of Nespolo’s undiminished theoretical alignment with the demands of Futurism—a movement that, precisely in the context of Albisola during the 1930s, found some of its most original expressions thanks to the marriage of poetry, ceramics, painting, and architecture.
“For Ugo Nespolo, ceramics is not a mere medium, but a testing ground where color becomes substance. In these new sculptures, created at Ceramiche Pierluca, we find the synthesis between the region’s artisanal expertise and the artist’s intellectual eclecticism.”
Riccardo Zelatore
The MuDA Exhibition Center – Museo Diffuso Albisola constitutes the centerpiece of the exhibition itinerary. Nespolo’s works—predominantly free-standing, spherical, and cylindrical sculptures, along with some previously unseen visual poetry plaques and sgraffito and relief plates—will be called upon to inaugurate the new museographical display designed by the Gianluca Peluffo & Partners studio.
The exhibition is spread across two venues, creating a dialogue between two iconic landmarks of Ligurian ceramics: the MuDA Exhibition Center – Museo Diffuso Albisola, and the Ceramics Museum of Savona.
The Ceramics Museum of Savona, on the other hand, proposes an integration of the ‘essential alphabet’ of forms created by Nespolo within the oldest wing of the building, which houses Renaissance and Baroque majolica.
Fuoco ritrovato – The Catalogue
The catalogue, published by Moebius Books, features contributions by Nespolo, Zelatore, Dario Bevilacqua of Ceramiche Pierluca, and Luca Bochicchio, scientific director of the Ceramics Museum of Savona, documenting the artist’s recent ceramic production.
Accompanying the creation process of the works is the gaze of Marcello Campora—architect, photographer, and vice president of the Fondazione Museo della Ceramica di Savona—who followed the production phases with poetic sensitivity, making a selection of his shots available for the exhibition. The images, integrated into the exhibition itinerary, capture the timeframe of the craftsmanship and the dialogue between gesture, matter, and fire.
Art Galleries – Overview
Placed in fruitful friction with the permanent collection of the Ceramics Museum of Savona, Nespolo’s sculptures bear witness to the historical continuity of a manufactory dedicated to the synthesis between art and craftsmanship. Archetypal forms such as the vase, the bowl, and the plate are thus re-semanticized —today just as in the seventeenth century— to respond to the symbolic and communicative codes of an ever-changing image society.
Click on the maps to discover the exhibition venues
