From April the 18^th a multimedia exhibition is going to open at Labirinto della Masone in Fontanellato, a town near Parma. An itinerary along which suggestions will be received to reflect on the nature of the labyrinth and its symbolic value. If you don’t know the cultural park wanted by Franco Maria Ricci, this exhibition is the right opportunity to visit it.

The Labirinto della Masone takes part in the cultural events of Parma 2020 with an original exhibition that will transform it into a metal maze. He will speak about himself and will do so by borrowing the voices and words of two characters linked in life to the publisher and intellectual Franco Maria Ricci: Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges. Part of the exhibition will retrace the history of the mazes of the world through a 360-degree projection of some works of art. Important loans from international museums will show that the labyrinth is a widespread symbol in all times and in all places. We will start from the myth of Knossos to the Minotaur of Watts, from the magazine Minotaure of Skira to the codex of Lelio Pittoni, an ancient volume illustrated with labyrinths.

Labirinto della Masone: Franco Maria Ricci’s masterpiece

This exhibition perfectly conveys the idea behind the construction of this labyrinth, which Franco Maria Ricci, publisher, and intellectual, opened in 2015 but had already imagined 30 years earlier. Shapes and paths, puzzles, stops and restarts are for him the symbol of life. He was fascinated by it and fantasized about a place to walk without getting lost. And when he had to make it he thought of using bamboo. Fascinated by its flexible stems, the park is home to around 20 species, for a total of 200,000 specimens. Formidable plants also against pollution, because they release a huge amount of oxygen. The labyrinth was joined by two other spaces linked to Ricci and his passions: the Museum and the Library. They host works of art and texts ranging from the 1500s to the 1900s. The various collections are inextricably linked to Ricci’s tastes, so much so that they are considered a single entity although they have a different nature. This project has become a way of returning part of what its creator received from this land to Parma and Fontanellato. If you are curious and you want to know this intellectual figure, you can visit the exhibition dedicated to him, his editorial activity, his graphic inventions, and his collecting passion through images, unpublished films and testimonials of friends like Bernardo Bertolucci, Inge Feltrinelli, Vittorio Sgarbi and the spectacular setting with the covers of his editions.

Labirinto della Masone is open every day, including holidays. It is closed on Tuesdays and on the public holidays of 25 December and 1 January. The opening time is from 10.30 am to 7.00 pm. The ticket office is open until 6.00 pm. There is no time limit to the visit, but it is advisable to allow at least one and a half hours to see the bamboo labyrinth, the galleries, and the temporary exhibitions. Tickets to the labyrinth give unlimited entry and exit on the day of validity.

Info: Labirinto della Masone

I Mesi e le Stagioni di Benedetto Antelami: May the 20th, 2020.  It opens in Parma a new of Benedetto Antelami’s artworks. Here, we will see his sculptures in the same way as he looked at them eight centuries ago for Parma 2020 – Italian Capital of Culture.

It is a great emotion to admire his important artworks. Sometimes the placing does not allow us to understand all the details, the sizes, and the expedients that the artists usually use when the sculptures are placed in a very high site. This is one of the reason, we should declare this new exhibition by Benedetto Antelami unmissable.

The statues symbolizing the Circle of the Months and Seasons in the baptistery of Parma will be moved from the first porch to the below niches. An uplifting platform will be set up in the Cathedral near Christ’s Deposition, this will allow visitors to look at all the details of this Romanesque masterpiece. We could imagine how Antelami looked at his operas or we could steal to the restorers – for once – a privileged point of view.

I Mesi e le Stagioni di Benedetto Antelami: a thought directly from  XIII century

I Mesi e le Stagioni di Benedetto Antelami will be linked with different exhibitions with the same cultural theme. The statues of the Baptistery of Parma were made by Antelami from 1196 to 1216 and they include the months and two seasons. In all likelihood, the cycle was to decorate a portal of the building but remained unfinished, it was dismantled in its parts and placed inside. The figures depict the months and the seasons through the work in the fields, documenting it month by month. Already other times the artists had ventured into this subject, but for the first time in centuries, a stronger naturalism was used in portraying tools and plants. Furthermore, work is no longer the divine condemnation born of original sin but has a positive, ennobling and saving value. It expresses a relationship of full balance between man and the environment that characterized rural society at the time of the artist.

In a world where these balances are completely unbalanced, the theme is highly topical. Thus “Il tempo della terra e il lavoro dell’uomo” (time on earth and man’s work) becomes the topic of the six conferences that will be held in the churchyard and the six meditations in music hosted in the baptistery. In the various diocesan realities, however, topics will range from the themes of peace and hope to social equity, to ecology. Instead, a parallel season of “conversations with the author” will be held in the churchyard.

So from 20 May, there will be one more opportunity to come to Parma if you have never done it and, if you already know it, to return to visit it with new eyes.

For further information, please visit: parma2020

The Egyptian collection of the Civic Museums, consisting of about eighty finds, can be understood at the end of the 1800s, in the years following the foundation of the Museum. The history of education is an inspirational key to the era and to the methods of acquiring the finds through purchases, donations and exchanges. From the fragmentary nature of the acquisitions, it emerges that the museum directors who succeeded each other in the nineteenth century did not pursue the idea of ​​creating a section of Egyptology.

The first donations, by Modenese citizens including the founder himself and first director Carlo Boni, date back to 1875. Among other illustrious donors of Modena who contribute significantly to the formation of the Museum’s collections, such as Marquis Giuseppe Campori astronomer Pietro Tacchini, who, recited in Egypt in 1882 to observe a solar eclipse, received as a gift a mummy’s head and three small stuffed crocodiles that he then sent to the Museum of Modena. From the Acts of the Museum it also appears that Boni, around 1880, had treated the acquisition of some objects with a famous French merchant and antiquarian, Charles Le Beuf. In the list of antiquities the offers are present, along with ethnological and archaeological materials, finds that in part will prove to be false.

The mummy and the other human parts (arts and texts) come from the Regia University of Modena, however the presence of these finds has been ascertained in the city since 1669, the year in which it appears in the lists of the “Ducal Gallery Estense“, a testimony that well before the formation of the Civic Museum the collecting interest of the Dukes of Este also includes Egyptian antiquities. The child mummy, in particular, attested in the lists of 1751, compares together a “a stuffed body; it is said of a queen of Egypt”, of which, at the moment there is no trace. After the last gifts of the heirs of Pietro Tacchini, in 1906, the collection is no longer increased

The finds, preserved over a wide chronological period, correspond to a different category, attributable to royalty, funerary ritual and Templar devotionality.

The collection includes “ushabti” figurines of the New Kingdom (XVIII-XX dynasty, 1539-1070 BC) and Late Period (XXVI-XXX dynasty, 664-332 BC), six canopic vases, including a set in the name of Horsiesi (Epoca tarda), amulets, bronzes, terracotta. Of great interest, a large beetle commemorating the sovereign Amenhotep III (New Kingdom, XVIII dynasty, 1388-1351 BC), which celebrates the bride Ty. There is also an Egyptian child mummy with cartonage and modern anthropoid sarcophagus, some heads and human limbs, as well as three small stuffed crocodiles and some linen bandages from the royal mummies discovered at Deir el-Bahari in 1881.

The inauguration of the exhibition on February 16 at the Civic Museums will be preceded by the restoration of the mummy performed by Cinzia Oliva, one of the leading Italian experts in the restoration of archaeological fabrics and Egyptian mummies, before the public at the Civic Museums, while in the weekend (9 and 10 February) methodologies and results of the intervention will be presented in the eighteenth-century Anatomical Theater in via Berengario, in collaboration with the University Museum of the UniMoRE University.

The exhibition, in the great hall of Archeology on the third floor of the Palazzo dei Musei, will be characterized by a strong reference to the nineteenth-century exhibition, inserted in a contemporary context with multimedia devices. To allow more schools to take advantage of an exhibition and educational path, the exhibition continues until 7 June 2020.

The dialogue with the younger audience will also be guaranteed by the social Instagram project #mummiamo to aggregate images and contents related to the collective imagery about the mummy, from comics, to cinematography, to literature.

Info: www.museicivici.modena.it/it/notizie/storie-degitto-la-riscoperta-della-raccolta-egiziana-del-museo-civico-di-modena

Can design be “timeless“? Can designers work outside the limits of their own times to create objects that escape the unpredictable currents of fashion and the tastes of the moment?
Everything that is realized reveals the beliefs, fears, hopes and concerns of those who created it.
The designer invests objects of meaning so that they can be interpreted even by those who look at them. And this is the starting point.
But where does Ferrari fit into the history of design?
In the first instance, design gives aesthetic value to ordinary objects. At the same time, during the last century, designers have aimed at a democratization of luxury.
Speaking of Ferrari surely, there is little ordinary (or democratic). And so it must be, because a Ferrari is always something extraordinary.
And it is also the most superb example of how a car can become an object of eternal beauty.
And beauty must always be rare and exclusive. This is one of the greatest paradoxes of his research and aesthetics: if everything were beautiful, nothing would be.
Design does not embrace a single area, but many.
Frank Lloyd Wright thought it was about getting the best out of contemporary possibilities.
For the architect Le Corbusier, it was “intelligence made visible“. Jony Ive of Apple believes that design is the achievement of local maximum, when it comes to perfection and simply could not make better use of materials.
But design inevitably reflects what philosophers call “the spirit of the time“.
The Savoia-Marchetti seaplane was a courageous aeronautical experiment – at the frontiers of knowledge – that gave architects a lesson on the economy of vehicles and functionality.
Later, during the reconstruction, Vico Magistretti and Enzo Mari were among the designers to give artistic value to simple household appliances.
Today, Apple’s refined minimalism is the answer to our dematerialized culture, where intangible data has more value than solid objects.
Design is not “art”. Or not really. Our notion of art requires the presence of a single author, however the most engaging cultural forms are design, pop music and cinema.
Everything is collaboration: Casablanca by Micheal Curtiz, perhaps the greatest film in the history of cinema, has had six screenwriters, not a single author. Likewise, building a car involves hundreds of specialists.
But when design becomes an expression of collective desires, when it teaches the public to enjoy a meaningful shape and understand the beauty of proportions and details, when it requires reading and interpretation … in the moment in which he creates a visual language, here he is usurping the role traditionally entrusted to painting and sculpture.
To understand if we are in the presence of a work of art it is sufficient to ask ourselves if an object has a quid of contemplative, if it means more than what appears superficially. Take any Ferrari … it is thanks to this quid that simple materials really take life.
Magic? Perhaps the design is supernatural, as Barthes said. Or maybe the masterpieces of design are immortal … if not even timeless.

Info: musei.ferrari.com/it/modena/mostre-in-corso

From 13 September 2019 to 6 January 2020, the Exhibition Hall of the Galleria Estensi of Modena hosts the exhibition Leggere by Steve McCurry, one of the most internationally celebrated photographers for his ability to interpret the time and the current society.
In church or mosque, in the streets or at home, in a market, under a tent, in the middle of nature or in a metropolis, in winter or in summer. Turkey, Italy, United States, Cuba, Afghanistan, India, South Africa. Whether they read a magazine, a comic book or a book, whether they are young or old, rich or poor, religious or lay, for anyone and wherever there is a moment for reading. Roberto Cotroneo then associates a passage with each shot, further involving us and giving us the impression of reading the subject’s own words by peeking over his shoulder, in a direct and intimate relationship with him.
Every shot depicts a person, caught in the intimate act of reading, coming from every corner of the world to witness the magical and universal power that reading has on the human soul. Immortalized by McCurry’s objective that confirms his ability to transport them to imagined worlds, in memories, in the present, in the past and in the future and in the mind of man, it is instantaneous to feel transported in these shots and to recognize oneself in the faces and emotions of the subjects.
The exhibition, promoted by the Galleria Estensi Modena, organized by Civita Mostre e Musei, curated by Biba Giacchetti, presents 70 images, includes the series that he himself brought together in a volume, published as a tribute to the great Hungarian photographer André Kertész, one of the his masters.
Completing the exhibition is the Leggere McCurry section, dedicated to books published since 1985 with the photos of Steve McCurry, many of which have been translated into various languages: 15 are on display, some of which are nowhere to be found, and all are books accompanied by photos used for the covers, often the same icons that made it famous all over the world.

For more information: Gallerie Estensi

From 20 September 2019 to 1 March 2020, Palazzo Albergati of Bologna hosts an exhibition dedicated to the poetic magic of Marc Chagall.

Through the exhibition of 150 works including paintings, drawings, watercolors and engravings, the exhibition tells the life, work and feeling of Chagall for his ever-beloved wife Bella. A core of rare and extraordinary works, coming from private collections and therefore difficult to access for the general public.

Curated by Dolores Duràn Ucar, the exhibition Chagall. Dream of love is divided into five sections summarizing all the themes dear to the artist: the Russian tradition; the relationship with writers and poets; the sense of the sacred and the profound religiosity that are reflected in the creations inspired by the Bible; interest in nature and animals and reflections on human behavior; the circus world; and, of course, love, which dominates his works and gives meaning to art and life.

The exhibition is organized and produced by the Arthemisia Group and avails itself of the patronage of the Municipality of Bologna.

For further information: Palazzo Albergati

Collezione Maramotti presents Rhizome and the Dizziness of Freedom, the first solo show in Italy of the young artist Mona Osman.
Osman, who grew up and lived in Budapest, Nice, London and Bristol, presents a cycle of new paintings created for the Collection’s Pattern Room.

Osman worked simultaneously on all the new works, in which we find influences and references derived from a work conceived at the same time, in a single space: the last year, in the artist’s studio.
Introduced by a triptych of portraits set up on an external wall of the main hall, the exhibition includes three large canvases and two medium-sized ones, all made with oil and mixed media on canvas.

Starting from the idea of ​​combining biblical episodes with notions drawn from existentialist philosophy – and with the intention of asking questions, rather than offering answers – Osman has pictorially developed a dense theoretical and spiritual reflection on the search for the Self.

According to the artist, man’s ambition to reach an absolute and immutable understanding of his individual essence clashes with the impossibility of defining it, generating anguish and suffering.
Two elements recur in the works on display: the idea of ​​the Tower of Babel and what Osman calls “Absolute Self”, the Absolute Self.
The Tower of Babel, symbol of the act of pride of man to rise towards the sky and the consequent divine punishment, becomes a paradigm of the impossibility of communication between individuals and of the resulting condition of solitude, of the absence of “another” through which we recognize ourselves.
The Absolute Self represents the ideal and monolithic version of the Self that we seek to outline and to which we tend, without ever really succeeding in reaching it. Reality and experience inevitably escape control, disclose unexpected discoveries and unpredictable changes. Like the Sisyphus of Camus, happy because in his condemnation he becomes aware of his own limits and assumes his own destiny, man should accept his indefinable existential condition and find fulfillment in a more open and permeable dimension, abandoning his will of clarity and perpetual progress.

Osman has devoted himself from childhood to painting and drawing, through which he carries out an investigation into the perceptions and tensions of man, often linked to a state of anxiety.
Inspired by experiences rooted in his personal history, the artist builds scenarios full of characters and narratives with which he investigates universal existential questions and the dynamics of relationships between individuals.
The canvases, which present different levels of depth and vision, are densely populated with characters, patterns and elements that do not belong to a defined dimension and time.
The gaze is driven to move from one detail to another, exploring the surface of the work through varied rhythms, associations and sudden revelations.
Featuring pictorial brushstrokes and intense colors, his pictorial language also incorporates resin and collage, with which Osman constructs a formal articulation of the surface of the works, in which echoes and styles of artists such as Klimt, Ensor and Mondrian appear to be freely reworked and incorporated without obvious premeditation or citationism.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist’s book in the form of a sketchbook.

For more information: Collezione Maramotti

Helen Cammock, winner of the seventh edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and nominated at the Turner Prize 2019, after the first London stop at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (25 June – 1 September 2019) presents the new exhibition Che si può fare at the Maramotti Collection , which will acquire the works. The exhibition, re-elaborated by the artist in the different space of the Collection, will also be enriched by an artist book created in July at the Central Institute of Graphics in Rome.

In the work of Helen Cammock, the female narrative is focused on loss and resilience with Baroque music composed of seventeenth-century musicians, inspirations and stories through which the artist explored the concept of lamentation in women’s lives through stories and geographies.
In addition to the recently created artist’s book, the exhibition includes a film, a series of vinyl recordings, a screen-printed frieze and a research room in which books and objects collected by Cammock and donated to her during her time in Italy are displayed.

The exhibition is in fact the result of a six-month Italian residence in 2018, organized by Max Mara, Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti, and designed to fit the artist. In his journey, which led her to make stops in Bologna, Florence, Venice, Rome, Palermo and Reggio Emilia, Cammock decided to explore the expression of lament and rediscover hidden female voices. During the residency musicians, historians, artists and singers opened their archives and shared narratives and research.
The three-part video that is at the heart of the show consists of interviews with some of the women Cammock met on his journey, including social activists, migrants, refugees, a nun and women who fought the dictatorship. The work evokes the power of female voices from the Baroque era to today’s Italy. Their testimonies are interspersed with musical pieces and films filmed in Italy in a complex visual and oral collage.
Five prints in saturated colors represent music and voice through line drawings and a long wall frieze contains images and words related to the women Cammock met in Italy.

What can be done is the title of a pre-operational lament from 1664 by the Italian composer Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677). Cammock took opera singing lessons to learn this air, which he practiced throughout his residency.
Music is a recurring element in the new video work and in the live performance that will take place during the inauguration of the exhibition: Cammock will perform Strozzi’s music accompanied by a jazz trumpeter, thus reviving the composer’s legacy through his voice. The music of the coeval Italian musician Francesca Caccini (1587-1641) is incorporated into the performance as a soundtrack to accompany the movement part. Strozzi and Caccini were famous among their contemporaries, but soon their names have fallen into oblivion and only now their compositions are taken up and performed once again.

A visual poet whose drawings, prints, photographs and videos are combined with words and images, Cammock carries out a multimedia artistic practice in which he embraces text, photography, video, song, performance and engraving, and is determined by his commitment to questioning traditional historical narratives on the identity of blacks, women, wealth, power, poverty and vulnerability. The artist draws on his personal experience, along with references to stories of oppression and resistance, incorporating influences from jazz, blues, poetry and dance, as well as the words of writers such as James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde. Cammock digs and brings back lost, unheard or buried voices.
For the artist, music – from Nina Simone and Alice Coltrane to the seventeenth-century preoperistic Italian music – allows you to pursue this research that explores the complexity of the concept of history.

For more information: Collezione Maramotti

For five months the Chiostri di San Pietro in Reggio Emilia will host one of the Renaissance masterpieces: the Portrait of a Young Woman by Correggio.
The work, an exceptional loan from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, reaches one of the Reggio Emilia artist’s chosen lands, five centuries after its execution, around 1520, thanks to an agreement signed by the city of Reggio Emilia and the Foundation Palazzo Magnani with the Russian institution.

The Portrait of a Young Woman by Antonio Allegri called il Correggio (c.1489-1534) is certainly the most important portrait painted by the painter. Nothing is known of the client and of the subsequent collecting events of the painting: his first modern appearance is in the collection of Prince Yusupov in the Russia of the early twentieth century.

About a century ago, scholars became aware of one of the most singular aspects of the painting, that is, of the writing that runs along the edge of the golden cup in the hands of the girl: a quotation from Homer’s Odyssey which shows how much the client belonged to a high-level cultural context, first of all passionate about classical literature.
The belonging of the young woman to a high rank is demonstrated, moreover, by the composed elegance of the clothes, the sober presence of jewels, the elaborate decoration of the hairstyle: these are typical forms of women’s fashion of the early sixteenth century, but treated with great originality.

The exhibition of the young woman will also allow us to take up the state of art on the many uncertain aspects that characterize the painting: the name of the person portrayed, the interpretation of the signs and symbols that adorn it, the purposes for which it was painted. Attempts to identify the woman started early, and Roberto Longhi, one of the most important Italian art historians, first tried to see the poet Veronica Gambara in the lady of Correggio; other scholars, even recently, have proposed different ways to identify the lady.

Beyond his identity, we are faced with one of the most incisive proofs of the Correggio painter, most probably recently returned to Emilia from the trip to Rome and from the comparison with the works of Michelangelo and Raphael. And this will take place in an exceptional architectural context, the result of the imprint of another absolute Renaissance artist, such as Giulio Romano. Let’s talk about the context of the Benedictine Cloisters of San Pietro, recently the subject of restoration and functional recovery on the impulse of the Municipality and the Superintendency, a cultural display for the first time called to host a masterpiece of painting of this relief.

For further information: Fondazione Palazzo Magnani