The Museum Imagined.
Stories from 30 years of Centro Pecci
22 September 2018 – 25 June 2019 Press preview: 21 September, 12.00 Opening: 21 September, 19.00
The Luigi Pecci Center for #contemporaryart turns 30: for the occasion, The Museum Imagined. Stories from 30 years of #centropecci reinterprets this legacy through an original itinerary of facts, statistics, anecdotes, memories and works selected from the Center’s collection and exhibition history, created by the new director Cristiana Perrella. More than a celebration, this is a narrative in autofictional form, in which the reality of what has taken place alternates with an imaginative vision of the museum that reinterprets and configures the past in the light of present sensibilities, projecting it into a possible future.
Since its opening as the first #contemporaryart institution created in Italy, #centropecci has stood out as a center of cultural production committed to artistic research in the wider sense of the term. From 1988 to the present, it has produced over 250 events, including exhibitions of art, design and fashion, as well as an insightful program of activities connected with literature, music, performance and theater.
The exhibition, composed of three parts, traces the stages of the Center’s history – starting with the initiative of Enrico Pecci, a textiles industrialist in #prato who imagined the museum as a gift to the city in memory of his son Luigi, which was met with immediate support and collaboration from the municipal government of #prato and the city’s entrepreneurs and residents.
The first part features a timeline designed by the graphic arts studio of Sara De Bondt, and narrates the sequence of exhibitions, concerts, programs, festivals and talks hosted by the museum across the past three decades, providing a chance to map a sort of DNA of the museum through various materials: videos, photographs, documents, audio tracks, posters and works.
The second begins with analysis – both statistical and semantic – of information from the archives, organized together with the MoSIS (Models and Systems of Statistical Information) of PIN, Polo Universitario Città di #prato, tracing a parallel, and at times unexpected, history of the museum. A story made of quantities: the number of works in the collection, the exhibitions, visitors, artists (a total broken down by geographical origin, age, gender). A glimpse between the lines of the narrative the museum has made for itself through the words and linguistic constructs chosen to communicate its activities in hundreds of press releases over the years, analyzed to bring out and underscore, as knowledge and awareness, the “hidden” information contained there. Conceptual areas, key words and semantic relations have been identified, through new methods of text and content analysis.
The timeline and the results of the analysis of archival data form a conceptual framework for the third part of the 30-year narrative: a new installation of a selection of works, in most part from the museum’s collection, selected by tracing the history of the most outstanding exhibitions held at #centropecci since 1988. Works such as those by Zorio, Schnabel, Cucchi, Merz, Acconci, Morris, which reflect the focus on the great protagonists of Italian and American art in the 1980s and 1990s, artists whose works were featured in important solo shows at the museum. Or those of John Coplans or Craigie Horsfield, pointing to an interest in photography that began with the exhibition Another Objectivity curated by Chevrier and Lingwood in 1989, the 150th anniversary of the birth of this artistic medium, then pursued with solo shows by great artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Nobuyoshi Araki. Other lines of research gleaned from the exhibitions reveal a specific sensitivity to the epochal changes taking place in Europe towards the end of the second millennium. It was no coincidence that #centropecci opened, on 25 June 1988 precisely, with an exhibition titled Europe Now, featuring works like those of Michelangelo Pistoletto or Anish Kapoor, to indicate the faith and enthusiasm for the concept of a cultural – more than political – community of the European countries, which would lead a few years later to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.
Also in connection with the European sociopolitical climate from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the Center widened its range to include the art of Eastern Europe, and in particular of post-Soviet Russia, with a series of shows over the years, including the very timely Contemporary Russian Artists in 1990, leading to the acquisition of works in the collection such as those of Ilya Kabakov. Over the years, close attention was also devoted to the latest trends in Italian art, with overviews like An Emerging Scene in 1991, from which arrived the large work by Stefano Arienti Cartoline, or Futurama in 2000, which led to the acquisition of Aiuole by Massimo Bartolini, and to environmental installations, starting with the exhibition Spazi ’88. The Center’s collection contains many works of great depth, like the piece by Mario Merz, La spirale appare, or the work made by Barbara Kruger on the facade of a factory in #prato as part of the exhibition Inside/
out curated by Ida Panicelli in 1993, as well as the work by Michael Lin done in 2010, or that of Thomas Hirschhorn, acquired at the time of the exhibition The End of the World in 2016, which will be reinstalled for this 30th anniversary. The focus on performance art and live events has addressed the extensive use of time and space, as seen in the remake of the performance Che cos’è il fascismo by Fabio Mauri, presented in 1993, also part of Inside/out, or the work by Kinkaleri, Otto, a performance that will be reactivated for the exhibition, as well as that of Jérôme Bel presented in 2017.
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the museum, a recent work by Martin Creed (Wakefield, UK, 1968) will be installed in the entrance hall: his neon, Work No 2833: Do not Worry, 2017. This is the one and only work on display that does not belong to the past history of the museum, rather, it is an invitation, made with the irony typical of its author, to look to the future with confidence.
www.centropecci.it
11.Julian Schnabel Ri de pomme 1988 photo Ivan D'Alì
5520x3684, 9MB
3.Enzo Cucchi Montagna 1989 Photo Zep Studio
5289x3526, 6MB
12.Gilberto Zorio Canoa 1984 Photo Carlo Di Pasquale e Federica Lazza
5616x3744, 9MB
2.Stefano Arienti Cartoline 1990-91 foto Carlo Fei
2362x3543, 1MB
10.Michelangelo Pistoletto Uomo nudo di schiena 19621987 Photo Zep Studio
3735x5587, 447KB
1.Vito Acconci Multi Bed # 1, 1992 Photo Federica Lazza
5616x3744, 7MB
8. Mimmo Paladino Senza Titolo 1992 Courtesy Centro Pecci
1920x2560, 648KB
6.Michael Lin Floor Painting 2010 courtesy Centro Pecci
2362x1770, 2MB
5.Jannis Kounellis Senza Titolo 1985-95 courtesy Centro Pecci
5103x4071, 3MB
9.Thomas Hirshhorn Break - Through (Two) 2016 foto Silvia Bavetta
1281x1920, 1MB
4.Anish Kapoor Here and There, 1987 Photo Carlo Fei
5236x3491, 9MB
7.Mario Merz La spirale appare 1990 Photo Carlo Gianni
3464x2739, 27MB
comunicato stampa
144KB
press release
149KB
didascalie opere collezione
21KB
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