Nico Vascellari: Melma

The exhibition is the first stage of a great year-long project that the artist has conceived for the city of Florence and that will involve some of its most emblematic places: Piazza Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio and the Museo Novecento. An ambitious project and a special occasion that arrives twenty years after the artist’s first exhibition, held in Florence on 25 June 2003.

This is the first time that Forte Belvedere, in its indoor and outdoor spaces, has been occupied by an Italian artist of Vascellari’s generation with such an ambitious and unique exhibition project in terms of temporal and spatial extension: an opportunity to shed new light on and support this generation of Italian artists and to share with the general public their view of contemporaneity.

The Melma exhibition at Forte Belvedere includes a selection of previously unseen works, specially conceived for this occasion and created with different media, such as video, sculpture, collage, installation and sound. On the outside of the Fortress, on the ramparts and in the garden, nine sculptural works – aluminium castings – from the series Horse Power (2023) are installed, accompanied by two videos, Fossil of Experience (2023) and Horse Power (2019), presented inside the ‘gunboats’ and a work, Falena (2022), set up on the façade of the building. The interior rooms are occupied by an exhibition with over thirty works, many of them previously unseen, which, playing on very different registers, offer a broad overview of Vascellari’s work, focusing on the relationship between man and nature, existence and transcendence, corruption and regeneration.

The second stage of the project, which was extended for one year, opened in October with several interventions in some of the most prestigious sites of the city’s historical-artistic heritage. Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio and the Museo Novecento will host a series of works, including a new installation for the Arengario, a site-specific performance conceived by the artist for the Salone dei Cinquecento and a series of works in the former Leopoldine building, taking into account the peculiar relationship between the Renaissance and the contemporary, between the public space of the piazza and the political venue par excellence represented by the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio.
In Piazza della Signoria, contemporary art returns to the fore after the interventions of Jeff Koons, Jan Fabre, Urs Fischer and Francesco Vezzoli in past years. Nico Vascellari has created a site-specific installation designed for the Arengario of Palazzo Vecchio: a poetic and delicate action at the same time, inspired as much by Renaissance images – such as those of Botticelli – as by the verses of Poliziano and Pasolini.