Nene Martelli and the informal in Turin

Nene Martelli began drawing as a child and frequented the Italian avant-garde painting scene before the Second World War.

Life and art companion of the sculptor Gianni Fenoglio, in the 50s she met Michel Tapiè, a painter, critic, and theoretician of fundamental importance in post-war abstract art, to whom we owe the fertile terms art informel, tachisme, and art autre.

She became involved in the events of the ICAR (International Center of Aesthetic Research) in Turin, founded and curated by Tapiè himself, where critics such as Giulio Carlo Argan and painters such as Lucio Fontana, Pinot Gallizio, and Giuseppe Capogrossi constantly gravitated, and where meetings took place with international artists such as the Japanese Gutai Group, proponents of an aesthetic in which, for the first time in the history of art, pictorial gesture, performance, and abstraction merged.

Filmed during a short series of meetings in her apartment-museum, this short biopic was made in 2017 on the occasion of Nene's 90th birthday as a supplement to her biography, edited by art critic Chiara Maraghini Garrone and Nene's niece, Paoletta Sacco.