Venice Biennale, special Golden Lions to Calvesi, Celant, Enwezor and Gregotti

The Venice Biennale decided today to award four Special Posthumous Golden Lions to four great personalities who have recently left us: Maurizio Calvesi, Germano Celant, Okwui Enwezor and Vittorio Gregotti. The 2020 Special Golden Lions will be awarded on the occasion of the exhibition The Restless Muses. La Biennale di Venezia Facing History, which will open at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini on Aug. 29 through Dec. 8. The Special Golden Lions will be awarded on Tuesday, September 1 at the Giardini della Biennale, three days after the opening of the exhibition.

“The international recognition of the Biennale,” said Roberto Cicutto, president of the Venice Biennale, “is also due to the work and originality of its artistic directors, who have marked some of the most significant changes in contemporary culture. The Biennale has been the laboratory where Calvesi, Celant, Enwezor and Gregotti have expressed original and visionary critical thinking that has been able to look to the future, often anticipating it. Le muse inquiete sees them as the protagonists of an exhibition on the history of the institution, which marks the start of a permanent dialogue between contemporary arts in the spirit of a common research.”

Maurizio Calvesi (Rome, 1927 - 2020), who died only a few days ago, was one of the most important art historians of recent years, and was also an art critic. Between 1980 and 1982 he served on the board of the Venice Biennale, and in 1984 and 1986 he was director of the visual arts and curator of the 41. and 42. International Art Exhibition of the Biennale. A pupil of Lionello Venturi and later of Giulio Carlo Argan and Francesco Arcangeli, he had a variety of interests, ranging from the Renaissance to Caravaggio, from Piranesi to the twentieth century, to the artists of 1960s Rome (such as Pino Pascali, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Schifano, and Mario Ceroli). He then directed National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome and was president of the Committee for Artistic and Historical Heritage of the National Council for Cultural Heritage, academician of the lincei since 1983, president of the Burri Foundation, editor of the four-monthly journal Storia dell’Arte founded by Argan, and founder in 1984 of the monthly journal Art and Dossier, of which he was scientific director until 1995.

Germano Celant (Genoa, 1940 - Milan, 2020) is known as the “father of Arte Povera”: an art critic, in 1997 he was appointed director of the 47. International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. From 1995 to 2014 he was Director and since 2015 Artistic and Scientific Superintendent of the Prada Foundation in Milan, where he curated, among others, the controversial exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italy 1918-1943 in 2018. From 2009 to 2011 he was Scientific Director for Art and Architecture at the Milan Triennale, while since 2005 he has been curator of the Aldo Rossi Foundation in Milan and since 2008 of the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation in Venice. From 1989 until 2008 he was Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. His last exhibition was the Richard Artschwager anthology at Mart in Rovereto a few months ago.

Okwui Enwezor (Calabar, Nigeria, 1963 - Munich, 2019) was a curator and art critic, journalist and writer, as well as a poet and historian. Artistic director of the visual arts section of the Venice Biennale in 2015, he curated the 56. International Art Exhibition, All the World’s Futures. From 2011 to 2018 he was director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, but he has curated numerous other major exhibitions such as the second Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa (1997), the 11th Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1998-2002), the second Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla in Spain (2006), the week-long Gwangju Biennale in South Korea (2008), and the Triennale Internationale d’Art Contemporaine de Paris in France (2012). A leading expert on African art (but with interests in others from other continents as well), he has pursued research that has included video and photography, archival theory, photographic documentary and photojournalism, and museum history. He is also known for his studies on theories of diaspora and migration, of postcolonial modernism, and thus of the architecture and urbanism of postcolonial African cities. In 1994, at only thirty-one years old, he founded the photography journal Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (co-edited by Duke University Press). As a writer and critic, he has contributed to exhibition catalogs, anthologies and journals, as well as published articles and interviews for major newspapers and periodicals around the world. He has authored numerous books including Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (2008), Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (2009, with Chika Okeke-Agulu), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (2008, with Terry Smith and Nancy Condee). Among his very numerous exhibitions, about which we refer to the attached biography, we mention here the last one opened on March 8, 2019 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich: El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, a monograph on the Ghanaian artist co-curated with Chika Okeke-Agulu, which then went to the Mathaf - Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and the Kunstmuseum in Bern.

Vittorio Gregotti (Novara, 1927 - Milan 2020) was an architect, urban planner and architectural theorist. From 1953 to 1968 he was a member of the Architetti Associati group, founded together with Lodovico Meneghetti and Giotto Stoppino, before creating Gregotti Associati International in 1974. Among his many projects are the Zen district of Palermo built between the 1960s and the 1970s, the headquarters of the University of Calabria, the science department of the University of Palermo, the Belém Cultural Center in Lisbon, the stadiums in Barcelona and Genoa, the transformations of the Bicocca area in Milan (including the Teatro degli Arcimboldi), and the new residential district in Pujiang, China. As part of the visual arts sector of the Venice Biennale, where he was artistic director from 1975 to 1977, he effectively introduced architecture as a discipline by organizing several exhibitions. Trained at the Milan Polytechnic, Gregotti has flanked his professional practice with an intense career in teaching, publishing and trade journalism. He has authored numerous seminal books on architecture, such as Il territorio dell’architettura (1966), Questioni di architettura (1986), La città visibile (1993), Identità e crisi dell’architettura europea (1999), Contro la fine dell’architettura (2008), Architettura e postmetropoli (2011), and Il mestiere di architetto (2019).

Pictured: Maurizio Calvesi, Germano Celant, Okwui Enwezor and Vittorio Gregotti

Venice Biennale, special Golden Lions to Calvesi, Celant, Enwezor and Gregotti

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