What to see this spring in Florence
Florence, despite being one of Italy’s capitals of culture, it’s not often considered a city for modern and contemporary art lovers.
However, this spring, it is actually home to some highly anticipated exhibitions such as Tony Lewis solo show at Museo Marino Marini. Alms, Comity and Plunder is the first solo show held in a european institution by the young African American artist, an exhibition created specially for the museum’s crypt. This exhibition primarily presents new works, or pieces that have been reworked in light of a dialogue with the architecture of the crypt. For the first time, the artist has decided to work with a material other than graphite, using pure pigments – characteristic of the florentine painting tradition – for one of his works. this choice underlines how the exhibitions at the marini museum are projects and productions that are always specially designed for the space and context of the place.
Also this spring, Palazzo Strozzi is to host a major exhibition bringing to Florence over one hundred masterpieces of European and American art from the 1920s to the 1960s, in a narrative that reconstructs the relationship and the ties between the two sides of the Atlantic through the lives of two leading American collectors, Peggy and Solomon Guggenheim.
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, the exhibition – the result of a cooperative venture involving the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York – will be offering visitors a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the crucial work of European masters of modern art such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Pablo Picasso and European masters of so-called Art Informel, or “Unformed Art,” such as Alberto Burri, Emilio Vedova, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, with large paintings and sculptures by some of the most important personalities on the American art scene in the 1950s and 1960s such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein and Cy Twombly.
In addition to these two shows, Eduardo Secci hosts Tensioni Strutturali, an exhibition curated by Angel Moya Garcia, which articulates itself as an organic project, divided in three separate exhibitions, which are mutually independent but yet interconnected among each other, and that will be gradually presented within the Gallery’s new exhibition spaces.
One last space to keep your eyes on is Base; it will announce its upcoming projects soon and it has just recenlty closed a solo show by Martin Creed.
