The 2021 program of the Museo Novecento was presented: an intense season of exhibitions, events and training projects featuring artists from the national and international scene, as well as the announcement of an interdisciplinary school of thought and a museum magazine.
The Museo Novecento does not stop. Despite the pandemic, which at the moment does not allow to welcome the public, it continues to work to carry out, within the limits of the restrictions, the programming scheduled for 2021.
The Museo Novecento program will continue with exhibitions by artists who have marked the history of modern art such as Arturo Martini and Leoncillo. In September it will be the turn of the solo exhibition of Jenny Saville, one of the leading exponents of the Young British Artists movement (with works in Casa Buonarroti, Palazzo Vecchio and other places in the city). Women are the protagonists of the exhibitions scheduled for next spring. Giulia Cenci, finalist at MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE 2020, has been invited for the Duel cycle, while the very young Chiara Gambirasio will carry out an intervention on the walls of the loggia inside the museum.
The enhancement of the collections continues with the new Étoile project, reserved for civic collections. One work will be chosen from those kept in the deposits, a solo that will allow us to focus, on this first occasion, on Titina Maselli, author of an ideal portrait of Greta Garbo. The project, curated by Stefania Ricci and Sergio Risaliti, is carried out in collaboration with the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum. To follow, another project of the Étoile cycle will instead be dedicated to Vinicio Berti, master of twentieth century Tuscan art whose centenary of artist.
The appointment with architecture is also renewed. The new appointment of The Architect’s Table is dedicated to Gender Gap, curated by Laura Andreini, a reflection on the role of women in the world of architecture with the testimony of as many as 20 internationally active architects.
In autumn, the spaces on the ground floor of the cloister will instead be occupied by the project dedicated to Monte Verità, Anarchy, dance and architecture, curated by Chiara Gatti, Nicoletta Mongini and Sergio Risaliti dedicated to the colony of artists, anarchists, philosophers and thinkers, born thanks to Baron Eduard von der Heydt in the 1920s in Ascona.
The Museo Novecento, in the spirit of collaboration with other institutions of the city, will also organize a double appointment with international contemporary art in the rooms of the Stefano Bardini Museum. On March 29 will open the exhibition of Ali Banisadr, an Iranian artist residing in the United States, known for his precious paintings that mix references to Bosch and surrealism. Banisadr was invited to create three site-specific paintings inspired by the reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, for the Sala dei Gigli in Palazzo Vecchio, a special event on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of the Supreme Poet. In autumn, again at the Stefano Bardini Museum, the works of the English painter Anj Smith will be presented for the first time in an Italian public museum.
Alongside the exhibition program, the Museo Novecento will continue its commitment to teaching and training. With this in mind, two ateliers will be set up within the museum rooms, cyclically assigned to young artists from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, partners of this project. At the end of the residency period, the artists will be asked to create an exhibition within the space assigned to them: the museum will thus become a center of production, as well as dissemination, of the creative talent of the new local generations.
The museum also announces the birth of the School of Interdisciplinary Thought which, from the beginning of May, will offer workshops aimed at tackling fundamental issues of the last century and of our time, first of all La Rivolta. The Museo Novecento thus intends to act as a reference point for an investigation into our society and the history of contemporary thought, putting professionals and apparently very different disciplines in dialogue: from philosophy, to literature, from economics to anthropology, from natural sciences to psychoanalysis.
In addition, in 2021, the long-announced course for curators, created in collaboration with the University of Florence, will come to life.
Another big news will be the publication of GONG, the museum’s official magazine, which aims to reconcile the academic dimension with the more pragmatic and “militant” one, in order to overcome the barriers and open the field of sector publishing to new possibility of criticism and art history.
Finally, agreements and projects are announced with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and with the FAF – Alinari Foundation for Photography.