Is there an Italian institution that you have a particularly close tie to, a project that you would like to mention?
The Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and the Fondazione Burri in Città di Castello. It was an amazing experience to work with both for the Alberto Burri exhibition during the 2019 Venice Biennale. Going to Città di Castello from Florence, with an obligatory stop in Monterchi to reflect on the disturbing beauty of Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto.
The most complicated and happiest moments of your career thus far?
In 2017, when we needed to present six of Fontana’s Fine di Dio works, two of them unfortunately became unavailable for display just twenty days before the opening. Fortunately, the project was a success anyway, and it still stands as one of the most wonderful projects of my life. On the other hand, the biggest joys have been all of the times that we have been able to help Italian art get into the collections of the world’s biggest museums.
Something important that you learned from an artist? And from a collector?
Preparing an exhibition on Arnaldo Pomodoro, I became fond of his simple but effective way of describing the history of art. He compared it to a chain, with the great artists being the ones who are able to add new rings to the chain. Every generation has lots of artists, but only a few works remain. Lucio Fontana’s cuts, Alberto Burri’s sacks, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirrors and Arnaldo Pomodoro’s spheres.
What would be your desert-island work of art?
I would bring a work that the eye would never tire of and that renews itself, since it would be the only one that I could have. The works in Alighiero Boetti’s series Tutto might be the only ones that allow the eye to expand over time, discovering a new composition with every look. Another work that I could look at for hours, that I think has an aesthetic sense that renews itself, is Modigliani’s legendary Nudo rosso (1917).
“Do you have any unrealised projects?”
My dream is to do an exhibition, which I am working on now, that brings together Enrico Castellani’s works and his thoughts about and influence on contemporary architecture, in particular the architecture of surfaces and the play of light and shadow that architecture started to explore in the 1960s.
