Florence, here is Francesco Vezzoli's site-specific work for Piazza della Signoria

As previously announced, contemporary art is back in Piazza della Signoria: from October 2, 2021 to February 2, 2022, Francesco Vezzoli is the protagonist of the Francesco Vezzoli in Florence project, curated by Cristiana Perrella and Sergio Risaliti, presented by the Museo Novecento in Florence and the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato, realized under the patronage of the City of Florence and organized by Mus.e.

Vezzoli has created two new sculptures for Florence, one placed in Piazza della Signoria and the other in Palazzo Vecchio. He is also the first living Italian artist to create a site-specific work for Florence’s main square. Here the work Pieta (2021), a monumental 20th-century rampant lion installed on an ancient plinth, can now be seen, crushing in its jaws a Roman head from the second century A.D., in a pastiche between different artistic epochs.

Inside the Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio, however, is the work The muse of archaeology weeps (2021). A “metaphysical” bronze head, a quotation from De Chirico’s The Archaeologists, is grafted onto a figure of a Roman togatus. This is the first time ever that the Studiolo houses a work of contemporary art.

With these sculptures Francesco Vezzoli restores disturbing new muses, reassembling the fragments of a lost civilization, reminding us that art is always a mental fact and that ready-made, ancient-modern assemblages are a practice with very ancient roots.

Compared to Renaissance restorations, Vezzoli fits into the conceptual path of De Chirico and Savinio, inventors of metamorphosis and mysterious collages, and instead of seeking formal harmony, he composes puzzling hybrids, linguistic collages that regenerate the forms of tradition but have a life of their own. A surreal world made of archaeology and fantasy, memory and invention, where classical culture becomes matter to be broken down and recomposed, to be made current in the present, finding in the hybridization with other themes, other epochs, the cue for artistic reflection on topics such as identity, authorship, and on how to remember the past, without denying or erasing it.

The Pecci Center in Prato will dedicate a solo exhibition to the artist from February 2022.

Image: Francesco Vezzoli in Florence, 2021 Installation view. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio

Florence, here is Francesco Vezzoli's site-specific work for Piazza della Signoria

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