Villa Pisani

EXHIBITIONS

VENETIAN NINETEENTH CENTURY
CONTEMPORARY VENETIAN

From 28 March to 26 September 2010, the National Museum of Villa Pisani in Stra (Venice) is hosting the exhibition Venetian Nineteenth Century – Contemporary Venetian promoted by the Architectural and Landscape Heritage Superintendancy for the provinces of Venice, Belluno, Padua and Treviso, organised by Munus in partnership with the Region of Veneto and curated by Myriam Zerbi, responsible for the nineteenth-century section, and Costantino D’Orazio, for the Contemporary section.

Housed both in the interiors of Villa Pisani and in its park, the exhibition illustrates the focal role played by Venice in training, welcoming and inspiring artists from the nineteenth century to the present day. A visit to the exhibition is organised in two distinct nuclei: the nineteenth-century works will be on show in the villa’s wide corridors, while the works of a series of contemporary young artists will dialogue with the park.

VENETIAN NINETEENTH CENTURY
The nineteenth-century section highlights the work of the most famous painters who trained or taught in the Venice Academy in the course of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. Works covering a time span of more than a century dialogue with one another, drawing relationships between leading names in art in the Veneto region, whose paths crossed in the lecture theatres of the Academy, an institution whose prestige has always been on a par with that of the San Luca Academy in Rome and the Brera Academy in Milan.

As we make our way through the nineteenth century, as tastes and the cultural climate evolved, changing their skin, and the Neoclassical ideal gave way first to Romanticism, then to Realism, the paintings on show – whose dimensions range from miniature to monumental – accompany us on a journey through historical scenes, portraits, paintings of genre and landscapes, to savour diverse nuances of aesthetic emotions, from the lucid, rational straightforwardness of the Canovan matrix of drawing to the enchantment of dazzling Vedutista colour schemes in the vein of the eighteenth-century tradition, and from the heart-rending allure of a landscape captured from real life to the sad humour of shrewd folk wisdom.

The interiors of Villa Pisani will house works by famous, celebrated artists, whose numbers include Teodoro Matteini (the first to hold the chair in Painting in the new location in the monastery and church of the Carità, where the Royal Academy was inaugurated in 1807), Giuseppe Borsato, Francesco Bagnara, Francesco Hayez, a pupil of Canova, a patron of the Academy in its early days, Ludovico Lipparini, Michelangelo Grigoletti, Ippolito Caffi, Pompeo Molmenti, Guglielmo Ciardi, Giacomo Favretto, Ettore Tito and Alessandro Milesi, as well as other artists of considerable worth, albeit less familiar to the public at large, such as Vincenzo Chilone, Domenico Bresolin, Egisto Lancerotto, Oreste Da Molin and Antonio and Silvio Rotta.

CONTEMPORARY VENETIAN
Demonstrating that Venice is still today a lively hub of creativity, where some highly interesting young artists train and work, Costantino D’Orazio has invited five artists who work in the Venetian context to measure up to the unique scenario of the park at Villa Pisani, where some of the world’s leading international maestros have shown their work in recent years. After Mimmo Paladino, Richard Long, Giuseppe Penone and Jannis Kounellis, the Villa’s park now opens its gates for the first time to the youngest generation of artists, taking a look at the people who are right now contributing to enriching the art scene in Venice with their output. Just as for the personalities of the nineteenth century, Venice has also offered these young people an important opportunity to train and to build careers that, over the years, have made their mark with participation in prestigious awards and public exhibitions of national and international stature.

Elisabetta Di Maggio, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Margherita Morgantin, Arcangelo Sassolino and Alberto Tadiello, who will be making site-specific installations for the park, will be the first blazers of a new trail towards the more contemporary avant-garde at Villa Pisani. In addition to illustrating the artists’ works, the catalogue of this section will also take the form of a guide to the institutions that operate in the area of training and promoting young artists in Venice today: from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation to Querini Stampalia Foundation, the IUAV (Venice University of Architecture) and the Contemporary Gallery in Mestre.

Elisabetta Di Maggio, who took part in the Quadriennale in 2008 and has been invited to the next international exhibition at the Bicocca Hangar in Milan, will transform the Coffee House into a glasshouse for plants that hang in time; Giorgio Andreotta Calò, fresh from a personal show at the Civic Gallery in Trento, will remind visitors of the original function of the ice-house in the Villa’s woodlands, with an evocative installation that plays with transparency; Margherita Morgantin, who has shown at the Quetini Stampalia Foundation and took part in the latest Quadriennale, will place a sign in the Villa’s maze to create an emotional gesture as the wind blows; Arcangelo Sassolino, who recently held a personal show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, will make use of the tension and resistance of materials to create a sculpture dedicated to the sounds most typically heard in Venice; Alberto Tadiello, winner of the latest edition of the Furla Award and currently working with the Mambo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna will penetrate into Villa Pisani’s tropical glasshouse with a sound project designed to enrich the otherwordly atmosphere of the place.