With the Confluences programme, the Cerruti Collection inaugurates a series of small exhibitions that mark the temporary presence of guest artworks in the house-museum. These exhibitions are made possible through a new exchange of loans with other prominent institutions and art collections.

Among the most iconic paintings by Giacomo Balla, Bambina x balcone (1912), on loan from GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, will be on display at Villa Cerruti from 25 September 2025 to 26 January 2026. Its presence at Villa Cerruti sheds light on one of the Collection’s most representative artists, establishing resonances with five other works by Balla already in the Cerruti Collection, which will be newly installed for the occasion.

Giacomo Balla, born in Turin in 1871, moved to Rome in 1895, where he would live until his death in 1958. He was an early proponent of Italian Divisionism and later became a leading figure in the Futurist movement. Bambina x balcone, one of the major works of his career, marks a transitional phase in his artistic development. After signing the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting in 1910, Balla increasingly approached the visual language of Futurism. From the summer of 1912, he began his first studies on movement—including the well-known Leash in Motion, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, and Rhythms of the Bow—focusing in particular on what he called “organic motion,” the representation of the body in movement.

The child portrayed is Balla’s eldest daughter, Luce, captured as she runs along the balcony of the family’s home on Via Parioli in Rome. Through the rhythmic repetition of her figure, Balla conveys a vivid sensation of movement.

The painting, part of Milan’s civic collection, sits nearly midway through the timeframe represented by the five other works by Balla acquired by Francesco Federico Cerruti, dated between 1902 and 1920. Together, they document the breadth of Balla’s artistic research, from his early realist and Divisionist years to the experimental phases of the Futurist avant-garde.

In two early pastels on paper – Enrichetta (La Seducente) (1902) and Via Po (1904) – Balla displays a keen interest in capturing the effects of light, a quality that would remain present throughout his career. These works also reveal his strong connection to photography, a passion inherited from his father and cultivated during his formative years in Turin. In the quick and fluid strokes of the pastels, one can observe Balla’s distinctly free approach to Divisionist technique, his attempt to express luminous vibrations and material complexity.

With Velocità astratta (1913), one of the masterpieces of the Cerruti Collection, acquired in 2005, Balla intensifies his investigation into the visual representation of motion. To the kinetic rhythm of the running child and the aerial trajectories of swallows, he now adds the theme of speed, depicted through the shape of a car—an emblem of the modern era and a central symbol in the Futurist vision of technological progress.

Also in 1913, once again from the long balcony of his home on Via Parioli, Balla turned his gaze to the night sky, reading popular scientific texts on the movement of celestial bodies. From these reflections came Orbite celesti, a painting that depicts the sequence of an orbital path within a clear and ethereal space. Its soft blue and violet glazes, almost transparent, give the pigment the appearance of a pastel drawing.

The focus on Giacomo Balla concludes with Piccolo autoritratto, an ink on paper from around 1920. Self-portraiture – an artistic genre to which Balla remained devoted from his early training through to his later years – constitutes a corpus of nearly ninety works, through which the artist documented the passage of time, changes in energy, and fluctuations in inner states. This enduring practice reveals, with remarkable sensitivity, the complexity of his identity.

Included in this body of work are textual self-portraits: in these, the artist’s signature, “Balla Futurista,” replaces his own image. These brief texts, parolibere compositions, and hybrids of language and drawing attest to Balla’s radical creative freedom as a polymorphic and experimental figure.