Catalogue

Few architects have had the privilege of shaping a city, and a capital city at that, a challenge that Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) boldly pursued in the futuristic Brasilia, a city of undulating, sensual forms. From Rio de Janeiro, via Paris and Milan, over the course of his long career this master of concrete created buildings that imposed his style, made up of domes, suspended columns and primary colours, grafting his idea of light and ‘tropical’ modernism also into furniture and design objects. An architect of excellence courted by illustrious patrons, he always remained faithful to communist thought, fully convinced that his work was only a pretext: what really counts is life, the human being, with his soul, his feelings and his perennial hunger for justice and beauty. With a text by Philippe Trétiack.A preview on the publisher's website.

Pierre Paulin (1927-2009) is the designer who best interpreted the spirit of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, with armchairs with sculptural and organic shapes in bright colours - such as Tongue, Ribbon and Groovy - that have become true pop icons. He was the first to bring modernity to the Elysée Palace, creating furniture for the private flats of President Georges Pompidou (1971) and for the presidential offices of François Mitterrand (1983). Many of his handcrafted sculptural pieces have also been mass-produced for the general public, while his modular furniture is considered a collector's item. Over the course of half a century, he explored all facets of design and established fruitful partnerships with various companies, including the Dutch company Artifort, which continue to produce many of his timeless creations to this day. With texts by Anne Bony and Anne-Marie Fèvre.A preview on the publisher's website.

Italian edition onlyThe exhibition project ‘Etruschi del Novecento’ hosted at the MART in Rovereto (7 December 2024-16 March 2025) and later at the Luigi Rovati Foundation Art Museum in Milan (2 April-3 August 2025) explores how many Italian modern artists found inspiration in the Etruscan art, both in terms of themes and materials. The exhibition itinerary offers the chance to experience this dialogue between ancient and modern, placing side by side with Etruscan works sculptures, paintings and design objects by artists such as Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Massimo Campigli, Gino Severini, Libero Andreotti, Antoine Bourdelle, Alfred Auguste Janniot, André Derain, Dino Basaldella, Afro, Mirko, Fausto Melotti, Gio Ponti, Francesco Romanelli, Alighiero Boetti, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and Mario Schifano.The catalogue presents the works exhibited by sections, with a series of in-depth essays by the curators of the exhibition and catalogue  - Alessandra Tiddia, Giulio Paolucci, Lucia Mannini and Anna Mazzanti - as well as experts such as Guido Harari, Nico Stringa, Mauro Pratesi, Martina Corgnati, Fabio Belloni, Claudio Giorgione and Matteo Ballarin.

The exhibition “Faces and Allegories. Sculptures by Lorenzo Bartolini” curated by Carlo Sisi brings together a selection of works focusing on portraits and allegories: subjects and themes pursued by the Tuscan artist - first a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, then official sculptor to the Bonapartes - at a time when the aesthetics of Purism with its “relative beauty” was imposing itself on abstract neoclassical forms, introducing into art the elements of a Nature observed without mediation.The first section of the exhibition, dedicated to the “Faces”, presents a series of female portraits “in conversation”: snapshots of those salons that in the first half of the 19th century represented the militant and often dissenting core of the intellectual elite of the time. Bartolini’s studio in Borgo San Frediano, Florence, was a mundane meeting place, so much so that the posing sessions were animated by cordial dialogues with which the artist “entertained people, young or old, authoritative or not, making them participate, while he painted the portrait, in the ideas and motions with the intention of capturing the soul, the special beauty that he strove to restore by availing himself of the conquered spiritual harmony”.The second section of the exhibition examines one of the cornerstones of Bartolini’s formal poetics, through the union of natural beauty, based on the study of the 15th-century masters, and concepts adhering to the ethical and political aspirations of the Restoration. With the group of the Carità educatrice, the apex of the Romantic allegory depicting the spiritual and intellectual education of children and alluding to the paternalistic care of the Grand Ducal government, plaster models are displayed to help reconstruct its compositional history, as well as a selection of works that outline its context and fortune.The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition consists of an introduction and an in-depth text on the ideological and cultural climate in which Bartolini moved, and an illustrated section dedicated to the works on display.

It was the year 1993 when Dave Hickey, the enfant terrible of art criticism, galvanised by the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe's Portfolio X exhibition, decided to launch a ferocious attack against the academic establishment by dragging a bygone theme into the spotlight: beauty.Demonised and accused of connivance with the logic of the market, the latter had long since wandered like a spectre through the ruins of the aesthetic debate, sowing embarrassment within the new ‘therapeutic’ institutions - museums, galleries and the entire art system. Like priests of a mystery cult, following the dogmas of Greenberg and Barr, the professors had mystified artistic practice with lofty theoretical disquisitions, underpinned by a corrosive distrust of all that was loveliness and seduction, ‘beauty’ in fact.In these four essays - more like a manifesto than a polite discussion - the Texan critic aims straight at the target and recalls how over the centuries authors such as Raphael, Caravaggio and Warhol have exploited pure form to establish an immediate relationship between the observer and the content of their images, in a democratic and liberating process.Thirty years after its first publication in the United States, the dragon evoked by Hickey once again spreads its wings and pours forth, sparing no-one, its fiery, provocative and unfiltered prose. Completely indifferent to the antipathies it may arouse.

The exhibition “Vulci. Goods for mankind. Goods for gods” (20 March - 4 August 2024) hosted at the Fondazione Luigi Rovati inaugurates the cycle “Etruscan Metropolises”, a project for a series of exhibitions dedicated to some important Etruscan cities considered not only as urban and architectural realities, but also as places of historical complexity. The project stems from the Fondazione Luigi Rovati’s aim of arousing and rooting interest in the Etruscans among the public.The Etruscans are a people closely linked to the phenomenon of the city, they are the ones who invented it and the ones who spread it throughout their territory. The choice of the cities that will be presented through the “Etruscan Metropolises” cycle will be illustrative of the urban phenomenon and its historical and territorial variables but also of certain specific themes, since each exhibition will highlight the most representative and identity-related elements of each city.The first city presented is Vulci, one of the most dynamic in Etruria, the site of important manufacturing activities and a strategic junction in the Mediterranean trade routes. A city that stands out for the production of ceramics and bronze, as well as for their wide commercial distribution to Italy and in the Mediterranean.The catalogue traces the exhibition path, presenting the works in the following sections: simulacra of immortality; immigrant craftsmen, local craftsmen; the liminal landscape; from Athens to Vulci: travelling images; bronzes for war, bronzes for peace; clay devotion. The volume closes with in-depth texts on the history of the excavations conducted at Vulci and in its territory that present some unpublished findings and innovative methods of approaching archaeology. All this is enriched by the artworks of Giuseppe Penone, which express the contemporary nature of the hand gesture that becomes a vase, and from the Etruscans comes to present days. With texts by: Giuseppe Sassatelli, Mario Abis, Alessandro Conti, Sara De Angelis, Carlo Regoli, Chiara Pizzirani, Maurizio Sannibale, Laura Maria Michetti, Christian Mazet, Simona Carosi, Maurizio Forte, Carlo Casi and Giuliano Sergio.

The exhibition "Giano-Culsans. Il doppio e l’ispirazione etrusca di Gino Severini. Dalle collezioni dell’Accademia Etrusca di Cortona" is dedicated to the theme of dualism and the double, in the two-faced, physical and symbolic relationship of dialectic and opposition. The protagonists are two Etruscan small bronzes from the 3rd century B.C., which are in turn compared with two sculptures by Gino Severini (1883-1966). The first of the two 3rd century BC Etruscan bronzes is Culsans, the Etruscan deity corresponding to the Roman Janus; the second is Selvans, god of the forest and agrarian activities.It is precisely from the Etruscan Culsans that Severini was inspired to create the two sculptures on display: the first is Giano bifronte, a bronze made in the early 1960s, while the second is a posthumous casting made at the behest of his daughter Romana Severini. Severini is an artist who has always shown interest in the Etruscan world, and more generally in the archaeology of his homeland with a strong connection to Cortona, his home town. An assiduous visitor to the Museo dell'Accademia Etrusca, he has often been inspired in his works by the finds preserved in the museum.The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, in addition to highlighting Severini's relationship with Etruscan art, delves into his bond with Pablo Picasso, another artist fascinated by the ancient world and the Etruscan one in particular, through the re-presentation of an exchange of letters dating back to 1958.

The Bisentina Island, pearl of Lake Bolsena, is renowned for the mildness of its climate and the extraordinary quantity and particularity of the tree and animal species it hosts. Long uninhabited, it preserves traces of human activity that has preserved its environmental characteristics, making it a unique ecosystem for the growth of centuries-old plants and the development of a rich avifauna. Francesco Barberini, an aspiring ornithologist and young Ensign of the Republic, visited the island periodically over the course of an entire year to survey and census the great variety of birds present.From this monitoring, he was able to observe how this place, an important stopover along the migratory routes, is rich in different species in terms of habits and behaviour, from the small florin to the imposing cormorants. The story of this adventure is a guidebook enriched by the plates of Marco Preziosi, a well-known naturalist illustrator, depicting the twelve main species of birds that inhabit the island.

A giant of design and architecture, the unparalleled creator of the Paimio sanatorium, the Savoy vase, and the designer par excellence of the curve, Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) is a national monument for Finland, the equivalent of Picasso for Spain and Joyce for Ireland.An architect of perception, emotion and inspiration, Aalto championed the spontaneity of energy flows and placed nature at the centre of his reflections. An introductory essay and an unpublished text by the architect himself retrace his human and professional stages: his first approach to drawing under his father's project table; his studies in Helsinki; his imagination influenced by national romanticism as well as by Finnish and Italian nature; his adhesion to functionalism and his final landing place in organic architecture. A path travelled together with his life and work companions, Aino and Elissa.

Sculptor, designer, scenographer, architect, landscape architect, Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was a complete artist who intimately linked his art to his life, in all its aspects. Dividing his time between the United States and Japan - his two homelands -, between abstraction and figuration, modernity and tradition, art and design, he worked without ever caring about borders. A leading artist on the post-war international scene, he is best known for his Akari lamps, a brilliant reinterpretation of the Japanese lantern, to which he dedicated a piece of writing - reproduced here - that has all the air of a love letter to the ancient art of Gifu.If his sculptural works now belong to the collections of the world's greatest museums, they also occupy the public space of the cities where they become, for many, terrain for play, meditation, contemplation, in any case, for life.

Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale is not only the oldest international art exhibition, but also the most eagerly awaited event. A coveted destination for every artist and curator, it has always imposed itself as a mirror of the contemporary and, at the same time, its subversion. This is well known by Massimiliano Gioni who, well before he was the youngest to lead the lagoon kermesse, every two years interviewed the Biennale's directors, meeting them at Caffè Paradiso, the historic café at the entrance to its Giardini.Through recollections, anecdotes and confessions, Gioni recounts a 30-year history from the point of view of those who conquered the Biennale and experienced it first-hand. He recounts the challenges common to all - the struggle against time and a budget that is never enough - and those specific to each, such as the choice of artists or the difficulties at the time of the Covid epidemic; the inspirations drawn from his own, or others', experience; the various attempts to establish a dialogue between present, past and future; the desire to break down traditions and bring a new vision of curating as well as of the Biennale itself. But most of all, what emerges from these conversations is the unmistakable imprint that each of them has left on their edition.Like snow crystals, in their complex and ever-changing weave, in the same way each Biennale is a universe of its own to which each director has wanted to do justice, thus describing an ever-changing world.

‘History is not in the image, but in our relationship with the image, in what it deposits in us,’ writes Bertrand Schefer, who first saw some of Francesca Woodman's photographs in the late 1990s and was thunderstruck by them. Those photographs, so repelling to him at first, return over the years to question him, to torment him, incessant as drops, persistent as a love obsession. He vows to write about her one day, to shed light on the enigma she embodies, to save her from oblivion. It is not her photograph he wants to talk about, it is she he wants to bring back to life, if only for a few moments.Like an insatiable archaeologist, he then re-exhumes everything that can help him reconstruct that 'missing story'; a story in which the flow of his own personal memories, triggered by the blurred and unattainable figure of Francesca, is mixed with the young photographer's biographical story: her childhood in Colorado, her strong ties with Italy, her parents, who were also artists, her first camera, her formative years at art school, her stay in Rome that brought such a singular temperament to maturity. Francesca stands out from the crowd, atypical wherever she goes. In her faded period clothes, she portrays herself from time to time as a phantasmal presence, ineffable, sensual, anachronistic, already aware that the contemporary world is not the scenario in which she will find her own dimension. If her art is the engine that moves her, it is also the poison that consumes her, the prison from which one day in 1981 she will succeed in freeing herself by opening the window of her ramshackle flat, at the age of just twenty-three, leaving behind an immense body of work.