The Nuovi-nuovi group was named this way in early 1980 during an exhibition at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, curated by Francesca Alinovi, Renato Barilli and Roberto Daolio. Subsequently, the three curators proposed gradually larger exhibitions, first in Genoa at the Teatro del Falcone, then in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1983, and in other venues. After Alinovi's tragic death, the task of supporting the group was taken on with undiminished dedication by Barilli and Daolio, who also curated a revival in 2000, at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin.

The Nuovi-Nuovi, although only so named in 1980, had a long gestation during the entire 1970s, in which they constituted a decisive part of the phenomenon of overturning the perspectives established, starting from 1968, by Poor Art and other similar tendencies. These, as we know, had intended to abandon the traditional techniques of art, starting with painting, in order to use the new technological media and with them proceed to an ”immaterial” conquest of the environment, paying more attention to the contributions of the mind (conceptual art) than of the senses, and in a certain sense taking up Futurism's invitation to disregard the museum and the past in order to set out to conquer an ethereal and impalpable future. But from the very bosom of Poor Art itself, tendencies of the opposite sign had already appeared, expressed by Giulio Paolini, and by certain aspects of the work of Fabro and Kounellis, so much so that in 1974, Barilli was able to organize the exhibition La ripetizione differente [Different repetition] at Studio Marconi in Milan, where the perspectives of those artists like Paolini, Kounellis and Fabro, revisiting the past and memory, but availing themselves of the impalpable instrumentation of conceptual species, were pointed out. However, there were also Luigi Ontani and Salvo, who more courageously made traces of painting reappear.

Since then, there has been a succession of initiatives in the same vein, that is, aimed at regaining chromatic, image and decorative skills, which has united the entire generation of those born around 1950. This vast activity, however, which was fairly unanimous in its intentions, branched out in three directions. 
There were those who, following Carlo Maria Mariani, wanted to simulate a kind of faithful copy of unknown, and in reality non-existent masterpieces, strictly following the criteria of “citation”, conducted in paradoxically conformist and super-academic ways. Others, on the other hand, in order to introduce a differentiating factor with respect to museum models, have adopted scrambled manners of ostentatious “ugly painting”, tracing the traces of a deliberately coarse and provocative expressionism. Finally, others felt that the required “different repetition” could consist of a translation of past forms into the light, translucent, joyfully chromatic register that was now characteristic of electronic images transmitted by video through the swarm of pixels.
In the end, it would have been better for these three souls to coexist with each other with mutual exchanges, but there was a partisan intervention by critics and gallery owners, and by the artists themselves who were inclined to take sides in clusters, so that three distinctive labels were born: the Anachronists, following Mariani, the Transavantgarde, encapsulated in five names, Chia, Clemente, Cucchi, De Maria and Paladino, and finally the vast cohort which, as mentioned at the beginning, took the somewhat generic name of the Nuovi-nuovi but which perhaps better than the others indicated the internal richness of that climate, also by virtue of the large number of members. In fact, the Anachronists entirely sacrificed the possibilities of new decoration (which in the USA had taken the name Pattern Painting), the Transavantgarde, in addition to insisting exclusively on the brutalist and “anti-graceful” aspect, almost ignored on a theoretical level the fact that alongside the “iconic” Chia, Clemente, Cucchi and Paladino, there was also the aniconic, decorative De Maria. Instead, the Nuovi-Nuovi were split almost equally between the compilers of images, but in the light, magical, playful register that befitted our postmodern age, and others who did not disdain the ways of abstraction, but also conducted it in enchanted and fabulous ways.
Within that group there was also a fair balance between surface solutions and others of a three-dimensional plastic kind, with a ready transition from one to the other. A partisan and unilateral selection then took place that pretended to reward the most clamorous and protesting route, i.e. precisely the Transavantgarde, which was forcibly assumed as the sole interpreter of a much richer and more articulated situation within it. Unfortunately, we must register the tendency, which has appeared several times, that for reasons of market or propaganda leads to restricting the products of each era into a few privileged samples, to the detriment of all the others. This has also occurred in the case of an overall more centralized and dominant phenomenon such as Poor Art, an inclusion that has, however, cut out many other worthy comprimarios.

It could be said that time has done justice to losers and winners, as the same extra-artistic, anti-pictorial and conceptual techniques that were put into orbit by the climate of '68, after a period of recession that lasted until the mid-1980s, have re-emerged in force, through an extended and almost dictatorial way that has come to be known under the term of post-conceptual. 
But today we are witnessing a new swing of the pendulum of research, which, after having conceded so much ground to the immaterial and impalpable, with exasperated use of photos, videos, writings, is relaunching the ways of a re-materialization, with the relative reappearance of the values of colour and image. Think of the topicality of the various phenomena of graffitism, muralism, wall painting and the like. Moreover, a certain official line, inspired by an “aesthetical correctness”, has never renounced extolling the cause of the Transavantgarde, and therefore all the more so it's important to continue promoting the cause of the Nuovi-nuovi as well, since their imagery continues to be in line with the characters of the iconology expressed by videos and electronic images, and their decorative flair is perfectly in keeping with the requirements of postmodernism in architecture and design. The Nuovi-Nuovi, as well as the Anachronists, are perfectly in tune with the post-modernist architecture as expressed by Rossi, Venturi and Graves, but in particular the Nuovi-Nuovi are the backdrop to the anti-design gloriously developed by Sottsass and Mendini, which cannot be said of the “wild” fruits of the Transavantgarde, except for De Maria's appreciable floralism, which is also fully in tune with the aniconic side of the Nuovi-Nuovi. The latter, in short, consonant perfectly with the current panorama of amused, agile, elegant expressions, such as those coming from the entire planetary production, in which the Japanese Murakami and Mariko Mori, or many Americans, from Koons to Kelley, or the Anglo-Africans Ofili and Shonibare, now play a dominant role.

This exhibition intends to insist precisely on presenting the Nuovi-Nuovi, in the plenary formation with which they have manifested themselves in the past in the prestigious appointments in Rome and Turin, not so much for their historical merits, the protection of which is much better suited to a public museum institution, as for their unscathed present-day validity, and ability to compete with the more daring and stimulating outcomes of current works in progress.