Florence Art Week

Florence once again becomes the capital of contemporary art with a series of exhibitions and events

Florence is once again the capital of contemporary art thanks to Florence Art Week, the week of art now in its third edition.

On Oct. 7 is the highly anticipated new exhibition at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Untrue Unreal curated by Arturo Galansino, conceived and realized with Anish Kapoor, the celebrated master who revolutionized the idea of sculpture in contemporary art: an itinerary between historical works and recent productions-including a large installation for the Renaissance courtyard-monumental installations, intimate environments and disturbing forms that create an original and engaging dialogue with the architecture and the public, transforming the Palazzo into a place concave and convex, whole and shattered at the same time in which the visitor is called to question his or her senses (through Feb. 4, 2024).

The Museo Novecento is organizing Effetto Novecento, a rich calendar of events featuring exhibitions of the highest caliber. Cecily Brown's exhibition brings together more than 30 works, including paintings and works on paper, most of them previously unpublished, born out of a reflection around the Temptations of St. Anthony, a subject widely investigated by artists over the centuries and studied even by Michelangelo who, as a very young man, measured himself as Vasari recounts with the color reproduction of an engraving by the German Martin Schongauer.

Robert Mapplethorpe's photographic works return forty years after the exhibition that first introduced him to Florentines, in a confrontation never developed to this level with the photographic images of von Gloeden, whose old-fashioned enactments anticipated the post-modern.

The Salone dei Cinquecento hosted a new performance by artist Nico Vascellari, Alessio. The work is a never-before-seen performance involving thirty performers inside in an immersive choreographic action that reflects on the conventions and codes of nonverbal communication.

The Museo Novecento is also hosting Endo, an exhibition by Namsal Siedlecki curated by Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli, conceived as a site-specific installation in the building's Renaissance cloister, interpreted as a veritable womb within which energy and matter continually regenerate (through April 3, 2024).

It is also the turn of Split Face, the first monographic exhibition in Italy by the American artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn involving the Museo Stefano Bardini and the Museo Novecento, offering the public the chance to get to know a series of unpublished or recently produced paintings alongside works of Florentine Renaissance portraiture and the masters of the Italian Novecento (until March 11, 2024).

The installation Pieces of Peace created by artist Felice Limosani in the Renaissance courtyard of Palazzo Bartolini Salimbeni, home of the Roberto Casamonti Collection, is on view until January 28, 2024. The installation is a reflection between identities that dialogue, between mirroring visions in which the reciprocity between the definition of man and architecture, as of the individual and the universal, rediscovers a harmony of form and content that is the basis of knowledge and sharing.

The Uffizi Galleries become the stage for installations by Joana Vasconcelos, the Portuguese artist who, by blending myth, history and tradition with irony and irreverence, challenges conventions and gender stereotypes. Through Jan. 14, 2024, three of her spectacular works reinterpret tradition, rooted in both popular culture and Portuguese baroque. Between Sky and Heart is the title of an exhibition that if on the level of technique the artist makes use of craft practices and appropriates objects related to domestic life, on the level of design she adopts an architectural scale that requires an engineering study.

In the Florence Art Week calendar, the exhibitions are flanked by extraordinary temporary openings, allowing the public to visit spaces such as the Ferragamo Historical Archive, a priceless treasure trove of documents, photographs, films, drawings, prototypes and, above all, products that tell the story of the company, its foundations and its developments, which thanks to Salvatore Ferragamo S.p.A. can be visited on Oct. 7.

The city's hotels are also hosting must-see exhibitions: the Gallery Hotel Art spaces in Florence are hosting the art collective Numero Cromatico with the exhibition A burning fire curated by Valentina Ciarallo.