CINQUANTA CENTO SETTANTA (A serious game about the idea of standards)

z2o Sara Zanin is pleased to announce the participation of Marta Roberti in CINQUANTA CENTO SETTANTA (A serious game about the idea of standards), presented by 1/9unosunove.

 

An exhibition of fifty works by fifty artists from various generations, all engaging with the same format: the B1 (100 × 70 cm).

The exhibition is both a survey and a game, a challenge inviting the participating artists to work within the constraints of this iconic format, originally developed as a technical requirement for printing and lithography before becoming a cornerstone of the visual arts. It exists at the intersection between the domestic and the museum, the unique and the serial, the institutional and the private. 

Nineteenth-century French painting would likely have regarded the 100 × 70 cm format as one of the least suitable for painting: positioned somewhere between the square and the rectangle, too vertical for a figure painting, too narrow for a paysage, and too limited in width to accommodate a marine.

The advent of lithography, together with the rise of posters and advertising bills, reshuffled the rules, introducing into the visual arts a new format optimized for paper production and destined to become standardized: B1. As early as the late nineteenth century, with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, painting began to move closer to the language of the advertising poster. This formal approach would flourish after the World War II, particularly in Italy, where the 100 × 70 cm format and its multiples became the standard dimensions for urban billboards and public posters.

Its widespread adoption reached its peak with American Pop Art and the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, both deeply engaged with the visual language of advertising and the aesthetics of the economic boom. It is from this historical context that the works by the leading artists of the second half of the twentieth century featured in the exhibition originate. This core group serves as the starting point for extending the challenge to a younger generation of artists, inviting them to engage with these same shared coordinates.

 

2 July 2026