Fourteen new works of contemporary art - including installations, paintings, sculptures, and photography - have increased and enriched the collection of Palazzo Forti which already had a notable group of works by international artists. These will be presented to the public on Friday 20 June 2008 on the occasion of the new hanging of the collection now proposed by the gallery and curated by Patrizia Nuzzo: a trip through the contradictory world of contemporary art where the variety of languages - from digital technology to traditional painting - is expressed by a play of assonance and counterpoint in an open relationship between space, the work, and the viewer. These are the three basic elements that gain further substance as they interact with each other in the splendid historical rooms of Palazzo Forti.
The ground floor rooms and the recently reopened area of the archaeological excavations are now ready to host the new works by Diango Hernandez, Massimo Kaufmann, Polona Maher, Carla Mattii, Margot Quan Knight, Matteo Sbaragli, Tetsuro Shimizu, and Nicola Vinci.
Besides these will be artists already with a consolidated historical reputation (Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, Giulio Paolini, Fabrizio Plessi, etc), as well as those researches characteristic of the 'eighties, 'nineties, and the new century as documented by the installations of Julia Bornefeld, the videos by Bill Viola, the photos by Cindy Sherman, Spencer Tunick, Vanessa Beecroft and Vik Muniz, the sculptures by John Isaacs, Roberto Barni and many others.
Having overcome, broken, and freed the boundaries of art, its "trends" and "isms" have lost their sense. Now a plurality of forms, means, and languages enter into a relationship with the spaces that host them and take on new and original meanings, transferring themselves from the object to its container. For his or her part, the viewer is invited to have an open and receptive approach to the world evoked by these artists, and experience an exhibition that is both empathetic and cognitive.
In the 2004 installation the plan was to give preference to a backward-looking chronology, highly appreciated by the public and critics alike; in 2006 we experimented with the idea of transversal languages through a thematic dialogue between history and contemporaneity that went beyond recording the history of ideas in order to enter into it. Today the gallery coherently continues its experiments by contributing to the new function of the gallery: this is no longer a temple of memory but, rather, a place for research that has been enriched with new instruments in order to propose itself as a living space for visitors and the works. A fertile terrain, a furnace for ideas that interact with the viewer and place him at the centre of the debate between art and the world.
