«Carlo Cantini. Between realism and imagination,» photo exhibition at Villa Bardini, Florence

«Carlo Cantini. Between realism and imagination,» photo exhibition at Villa Bardini, Florence

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From the artistic to the bucolic; from fashion photography to everyday documentary snapshots, this is the artistic journey of Carlo Cantini, a contemporary Florentine photographer and one of the best Italian photographers of the 20th century. On display until March 17 at Villa Bardini, Carlo Cantini. Between Realism and Imagination exhibits seventy photographs, inspired by Berengo Gardin and Mario Giacomelli, which document some of Florence’s most significant events of the last fifty years of the past century. His photographs document Florentine streets and countryside everyday scenes. Besides that, Cantini´s work is connected to the Pitti fashion shows, theater, contemporary art, enchanted gardens and allegorical nymphs, classical nude paying tribute to sculpture, and architecture. All in all, Cantini´s œuvre is a constant search for equilibrium between realism and imagination.

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«Verrocchio, Master of Leonardo,» retrospective at Palazzo Strozzi

«Verrocchio, Master of Leonardo,» retrospective at Palazzo Strozzi

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The first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488) will be on display in Florence from March 9 to July 14 at Palazzo Strozzi, with an accompanying presentation at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Verrocchio, Master of Leonardo brings together masterpieces by Verrocchio from collections around the world, contextualized by works from his forefathers and peers, as well as by the pupils he worked intensively with, including Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli.

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«Italy in Hollywood,” exhibition at Museo Salvatore Ferragamo of Florence

«Italy in Hollywood,” exhibition at Museo Salvatore Ferragamo of Florence

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The years from 1915 to 1927, which Salvatore Ferragamo spent in California, are the source of inspiration for the new exhibition hosted by Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, focusing on the presence of Italians in that area and their influence on various sectors, from art to craftsmanship, and in the nascent film industry. The exhibition begins with the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where the Italian Pavilion designed by Marcello Piacentini consolidated the Americans’ appreciation for Italian art and architecture.…

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«The Cleaner:» Marina Abramović at Palazzo Strozzi

«The Cleaner:» Marina Abramović at Palazzo Strozzi

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Florence is alive and wants to express itself. Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents a retrospective of world-wide acclaimed performance artist Marina Abramović. The show opens its doors on September 21, the same day that L’Eredità delle Donne festival begins. During four months, till January 20, 2019, Florence and particularly the Palazzo Strozzi hosts an exhibition that pays tribute to the fifty-year career of one of the heavyweights of Action Art. She is the first woman that has a “solo exhibition” at the Palazzo Strozzi.…

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Primo Conti, exhibition at Villa Bardini in Florence

Primo Conti, exhibition at Villa Bardini in Florence

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The current exhibition at Villa Bardini, «Fanfare e silenzi. Viaggio nella pittura di Primo Conti,» is dedicated to the Florentine painter Umberto Primo Conti. Thirty years after his death, the show wants to illustrate and celebrate the artistic career of Conti, painter, composer and writer who belonged to the Italian avant-garde movement Futurism. In a chronological itinerary through the rooms of Villa Bardini, the display is divided into eight thematic sections, that correspond the different phases of Conti’s artistic career. Besides that, his oeuvre has been contextualized through the dialogue with artworks by other artists — teachers, friends, classmates … — connected with his creations. This relational exhibition responds to Conti’s own attitude, as he wanted to preserve not only his legacy but also the collective memory of an artistic period as extraordinary and flourishing as the Florence prior World War I. Until January 13, 2019.

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“BANKSY – This is not a photo opportunity,» Banksy at Palazzo Medici Riccardi

“BANKSY – This is not a photo opportunity,» Banksy at Palazzo Medici Riccardi

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There is no doubt that if Banksy had lived during the Renaissance in Florence, the Medici would have been his patrons — they were the Maecenas of most of the art produced in Florence at that time. Any case, supposedly, Banksy artworks do not belong to anyone, but to the cities public space where he intervenes. However, the system devours everything, yet the supposed «anti-system» expressions as the graffiti made by Banksy. A proof of this is the exhibition organized at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, opened until February 24, 2019. Curated by Gianluca Marziani and Stefano S. Antonelli, the show brings together twenty images of Banksy’s most iconic pieces, those that won world fame due to its thematic: capitalism, war, surveillance, or massive migratory movements.…

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‘Steve McCurry. Icons,’ photo exhibition at Villa Bardini

‘Steve McCurry. Icons,’ photo exhibition at Villa Bardini

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On view until September 16, Villa Bardini presents a retrospective dedicated to the artist Steve McCurry (Darby, Pensilvania, 1950), one of the great masters of contemporary and documentary photography. Curated by Biba Giacchetti, the exhibition entitled Steve McCurry. Icons displays more than a hundred photographs featuring the best works of the North American photographer produced during his extensive career spanning over forty years. The exhibition takes visitors on a symbolic journey through countries like India, Afghanistan, Burma, Japan, Cuba or Brazil across the complex universe full of experiences and emotions carried in McCurry’s images.
Steve McCurry. Icons – Villa Bardini – Costa San Giorgio 2, Florence (admission: 10 EUR)

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Pontormo at Palazzo Pitti: from drawing to painting

Pontormo at Palazzo Pitti: from drawing to painting

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The exhibition Incontri miracolosi: Pontormo dal disegno alla pittura (Miraculous Encounters: Pontormo from drawing to painting) presents a series of works of outstanding importance, most of which are here displayed for the first time together. Thirty years after it was last here, the return visit to Florence of the Halberdier (1494- 1557) is the perfect occasion for an exhibition dedicated to Pontormo. This magnificent portrait by Pontormo, acquired by the Getty Museum of Los Angeles in 1989 for the then record-breaking sum of $32.5 million, now finds itself back in its home town of Florence. It’s the centre piece of the exhibition curated by Bruce Edelstein, which is now on show in the Sala delle Nicchie in Palazzo Pitti until 29th July 2018. Displayed along with the Halberdier, there is also the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, among other master pieces.

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Exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi: «Down of a Nation. From Guttuso to Fontana and Schifano»

Exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi: «Down of a Nation. From Guttuso to Fontana and Schifano»

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Until 22nd July 2018, Palazzo Strozzi is hosting the exhibition Dawn of a Nation. From Guttuso to Fontana and Schifano, a truly mesmerising exploration of art, politics and society in Italy from the 1950s to the protest years in the late ’60s, with eighty works of art by such masters as Renato Guttuso, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Emilio Vedova, Piero Manzoni, Mario Schifano, Mario Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto. The exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, illustrates the effervescence of Italian culture after World War II, the years of the so-called “economic miracle” that marked a major transformation in Italian society, up until the fateful year of 1968. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey setting out from the diatribe between Realism and Abstraction, continuing on to the triumph of Informal Art and leading through the images, gestures and figures of Pop Art in strident juxtaposition with the experimental vision of monochromatic painting, right up to the language of Arte Povera and of Conceptual Art.…

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Salvatore Ferragamo and twentieth-century visual culture

Salvatore Ferragamo and twentieth-century visual culture

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Salvatore Ferragamo returned to Italy in 1927 after twelve years in the United States. In 2017, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of his homecoming, the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo presented this exhibition offering an overview of the 1920s, a decade now recognized as an authentic forge of open-minded ideas and experimentation free of ideological constraints and prejudices. Ferragamo chose to settle in Florence in virtue of its acknowledged centrality in the geography of Italian taste and style at a time in which the word “return” was especially meaningful: the return to order in the arts, the return to professional skill and to the great national tradition. Developed in chapters like a coming-of-age story, the exhibition focuses precisely on this trend in the culture of the period. Curated by Carlo Sisi, it takes Ferragamo’s voyage on an ocean liner back to Italy as its guiding thread: a metaphor of his mental journey through the Italian visual culture of the 1920s, the source of the themes and works that were to influence his poetic vision directly or indirectly.
1927, il ritorno in Italia – Till May 2 at Museo Ferragamo, Palazzo Spini Feroni, Florence

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