Vermeer, Koons and Picasso star in the new season of The Great Art at the Movies

Great Art at the Movies returns to Italian cinemas this fall, a new season of the project that Nexo Digital dedicates to great painters, sculptors, architects, museums, exhibitions and artistic movements, bringing documentaries to the big screen.

The first event will be Oct. 2, 3 and 4 with VERMEER. THE GREATEST EXHIBITION that will take viewers through the largest Vermeer retrospective in history. A once-in-a-lifetime event that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hosted until last June, going immediately sold out. In fact, huge public demand exceeded all expectations with 650,000 tickets sold. The event at the cinema invites art lovers to a private viewing of this exhibition in the company of the Rijksmuseum director and exhibition curators. The exhibition is the largest ever devoted exclusively to the “master of light,” featuring 28 of his 35 known works from countries around the world. Never before have so many of Vermeer’s masterpieces been brought together in one place. Directed by director David Bickerstaff, the film offers audiences the chance to view Vermeer’s masterpieces (including The Girl in the Turban, The Geographer, The Milkmaid, and the recently restored Woman Reading a Letter in Front of the Window) on the big screen and reveals the insights of the team behind the exhibition, world-renowned curators and Vermeer experts, shedding new light on the painter’s mysterious life and masterful work, his artistic choices and the motivations behind his compositions, as well as the creative process behind his paintings. VERMEER. THE GREATEST EXHIBITION is produced by Phil Grabsky with Exhibition on Screen.

Coming to theatersOct. 23-25 is JEFF KOONS. A PRIVATE PORTRAIT, directed by Pappi Corsicato, produced by Nexo Digital and dedicated to one of the most influential, popular and controversial artists of recent decades. Throughout his career, Koons experimented with new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed artists’ relationship with the cult of celebrity and the global marketplace. And he managed to elevate kitsch and pop to turn them into masterpieces like few visionary artists in recent history. Now his intimate portrait comes to film to tell the hidden dynamics behind the person, the artist and the Koons brand. Moving from America to Europe and Qatar through several decades, the film will be a unique opportunity to understand the man who took mass-produced everyday objects and transformed them into the highest form of art, elevating their status from ordinary to sublime. Through the words of Koons, his sister, wife, and children, as well as critics, gallery owners, artists, and scholars such as Mary Boone, Jeffrey Deitch, Massimiliano Gioni, Antonio Homem, Dakis Joannou, Stella McCartney, Andy Moses, Norman Rosenthal, Scott Rothkopf, Julian Schnabel, and Linda Yablonsky, the docu-film will take on an intimate journey into the mind of Jeff Koons, with the goal of discovering what motivates him today and what has shaped his incomparable vision over the course of his career. A world in which everyday objects and nostalgia for 20th-century pop transcend their original forms and are transformed into works of art, leaving the viewer to look inside his or her own reflections.

Instead, on Nov. 27, 28 and 29 will come PICASSO A PARIS. HISTORY OF A LIFE AND A MUSEUM, produced by 3D Productions and Nexo Digital in collaboration with the Musée National Picasso in Paris. Produced on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, the docufilm, directed by Simona Risi on a subject by Didi Gnocchi and Sabina Fedeli, who also signs the screenplay with Arianna Marelli, is inspired by a famous sentence of the artist: “Painting is not an aesthetic operation: it is a form of magic intended to perform a work of mediation between this foreign and hostile world and us.” The aim of the docufilm is to place at the center of the narrative precisely this great magic and one of the places where it can best be appreciated, the Picasso Museum in Paris. The documentary follows two parallel narrative strands. The main one is that of the Museum. Within this plot develops a portrait of Picasso, his very long life, contradictions of character, wives and companions, all told in close connection with Paris, the city he most loved and where he spent most of his existence. Still little-known aspects of the painter, which historians and art historians are only now beginning to investigate, will also be recounted, such as his having been “a foreigner” in Paris, an uprooted person, an anarchist ’on special police watch’ even when he had already become famous. There will be no shortage of analyses of works, such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and it will be discovered that it is even possible to cast a ’queer’ gaze on the artist’s work.

Great Art at the Movies is an original and exclusive project of Nexo Digital.

For 2023, La Grande Arte al Cinema is exclusively distributed in Italy by Nexo Digital with media partners Radio Capital, Sky Arte, MYmovies.it and in collaboration with Abbonamento Musei.

Pictured, Jan Vermeer, The Milkmaid (ca. 1660; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum)

Vermeer, Koons and Picasso star in the new season of The Great Art at the Movies

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