The rich program of exhibitions and events dedicated to ceramics returns to Montelupo Fiorentino

Now in its 31st edition, Cèramica 2024 will be held June 21, 22 and 23 in Montelupo Fiorentino, offering a rich program of exhibitions, site-specific installations, events, international residencies and exchanges, workshops and laboratories, open workshops and performance activities. This year’s theme, Alchemy of Matter, serves as a pretext for a contemporary reflection on alchemy, serving as a common thread for the 2024 edition of Cèramica. For three days, Montelupo will thus be transformed into a creative workshop, highlighting the places of ceramic production. This event will allow people to meet in workshops that stimulate creativity and promote intelligent and innovative use of urban spaces.

The event will include exhibitions and events in all the nerve centers of Montelupo.

The exhibitions

Terre di Spezierie: Montelupo Ceramics for Santa Maria Nuova and the Historic Pharmacies of Tuscany, curated by Lorenza Camin and Alessio Ferrari at the Museum of Ceramics. The role of the Montelupo Fiorentino manufactory for the hospital, private and convent apothecaries’ shops of Tuscany will be documented through a widespread exhibition involving a variety of exhibition centers: the Museum of Ceramics in Montelupo Fiorentino, the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, the Museo Galileo, the Museo di San Marco, the Officina di Santa Maria Novella, the Antica Spezieria Servitori in Figline Valdarno (Florence), the Aboca Museum in Sansepolcro (Arezzo) and the Spezieria di Santa Fina, Museo Civico di San Gimignano (Siena). The exhibition presents ceramics that testify to the long relationship between Montelupo manufactures and the pharmacies of Tuscany. As early as the 15th century, Montelupo master potters supplied vessels for hospital, convent and private apothecaries, and fragments of these vessels, found in excavations of the kilns, demonstrate Montelupo’s importance in this sector. In fact, the vessels, decorated like table faience, ensured good preservation of medicines and were easy to clean. The spread of these ceramics in museum and private collections, both in Italy and abroad, confirms the importance of the orders Montelupo received between the 15th and 17th centuries. The exhibition will be on view until January 6, 2025.

SPICE, Alchemy in Ceramics, curated by Benedetta Falteri at the Palazzo Podestarile. Montelupo ceramicists reinterpret the historical role of local ceramics in Tuscan pharmacies addressed in the exhibition Terre di Spezierie: Montelupo’s ceramics for Santa Maria Nuova and the historic pharmacies of Tuscany through sculptures, installations, workshops and performances. Ceramics are not only containers for medicated ointments, perfumes and spices, but also of intangible and symbolic values such as care, beauty, harmony and well-being. Shapes and decorations that accompany gestures and preserve substances and essences. A non-domestic use of ceramics, but always linked to the everyday sphere of life, and which highlights content and container, style and beauty, functionality and resistance of materials, opening a reflection on the restitution, in the contemporary world, of the many concepts that can be applied to it. Works by Ivana Antonini, Giulia Alba Chiara Bono, Stefano Bartoloni, Patrizio Bartoloni, Giulia Cantarutti, Shilha Cintelli, Carlotta Fantozzi, Karin Putsch Grassi, Andrea Susanne Heinisch, Marzia Pallanti, Sergio Pilastri, Paola Staccioli, Beatriz Irene Scotti and Paola Ramondini, Eugenio Taccini, Serena Tani and Marco Ulivieri will be featured.

Cantieri Montelupo, contemporary ceramic art and relationship, curated by Christian Caliandro, at the Via XX Settembre Gallery and on the Pesa River embankment wall. The exhibition will present works from the third edition of Cantieri Montelupo, the artist residency program that this year involved artists Anna Capolupo, Maria Palmieri, Roxy in the Box, and Alessandro Scarabello, along with ceramists Ceramiche d’Arte Ammannati, Patrizio Bartoloni, Ivana Antonini (with the collaboration of Marco Ulivieri) and Stefano Bartoloni. The exhibition constitutes the concluding moment of a path of artist residencies that began in June 2023 and recently concluded, which gave rise to the development of research paths between visual art and ceramics and to the creation of two site-specific works created thanks to the active involvement of local ceramists and the entire community of Montelupo Fiorentino. The project aims to promote dialogue between the museum, ceramic production and the community, using the language of contemporary art. Artists with no prior experience with ceramics, and indeed who come from the languages seemingly most distant from it, are invited, so as to activate spontaneous mechanisms free from prior conditioning.

Installations and site-specific works

A ceramic flower is born! - Ugo La Pietra in Vittorio Veneto Square.

The inauguration of the new work Nasce un fiore di ceramica! created by the ceramists of Montelupo based on a project by artist Ugo La Pietra enriches the itinerary of site-specific works that already consists of thirteen installations created by Ugo la Pietra, Lucio Perone, Gianni Asdrubali, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Loris Cecchini, Bertozzi & Casoni, Fabrizio Plessi, Andrea Salvatori, Luce Raggi, Mario Trimarchi, Antonio Aricò, and Marco Bagnoli. The new intervention is oriented on the characterization of the access walls and staircase of Vittorio Veneto Square. In formulating the design, Ugo La Pietra drew on the traditional motifs of Montelupo ceramics. The staircase will reproduce, in an increasing form, a flower blooming at each step, using the traditional polychromy of Montelupo ceramics with a motif that echoes the elaboration of plant motifs contained in the museum’s historical collections, but also the later elaborations of twentieth-century productions. The side panels, on the other hand, constitute an artistic elaboration of the forms contained in the traditional repertoire of Montelupo ceramics (vases, containers, open forms).

Site-specific installations of the Cantiere Montelupo project installed along the embankment wall of the Pesa River. During the recently concluded Cantieri Montelupo art residencies, Anna Capolupo and Alessandro Scarabello tackled the creation of large porcelain panels that were installed on the Pesa riverbank wall.

Anna Capolupo’sRapacissime: “A still life with harpy” measuring three meters by three meters in which Anna Capolupo, with the rich and dense painting that characterizes her production, reworked one of the most famous figures of the Montelupese ceramic tradition.

Opera Nigra by Alessandro Scarabello: A three-by-seven-meter black-and-white triptych featuring an animal in metaphysical spaces painted by Alessandro Scarabello in his unmistakable gestural style.

Ceramics Exhibition Market.

Over the course of the three-day event, the ceramics exhibition market will be held with exhibitors from all over Italy and abroad. An overview of the contemporary Italian and international artisanal and artistic scene that will also host ceramists from Montelupo Fiorentino’s twin cities and the cities in the AICC network, with the collaboration of the Montelupo Fiorentino Ceramics Road Association, CNA and the Union of Samminiatello Terracotta Kilns.

Workshops and demonstrations

The magic of terracotta - Piazza della Libertà: the masters of the Unione delle Fornaci della Terracotta, known for the skill with which they make large jugs as well as small artifacts, will give demonstrations of lathe molding and decoration.

The ceramics workshop - Corso Garibaldi: Master potters from Montelupo, with guests arriving from Italian ceramics cities, will offer demonstrations of various working techniques in a space that recreates the workshop atmosphere. Work from the manufactures and artists of the Montelupo Fiorentino Ceramic Road, ranging from the repertoire of traditional ceramics, to design, raku techniques, and contemporary artistic sculpture, will also be set up among the work stations.

Children’s Cèramica - Garden of the Palazzo Podestarile and historic center: during the three days, specific workshops and activities aimed at children and young people will be offered. Art workshops in manipulation, sculpture and decoration will be held on the afternoons of the event in the garden of the Palazzo Podestarile, as well as performances and widespread entertainment.

Image: Bitossi Archive Museum. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Agnese Bedini.

The rich program of exhibitions and events dedicated to ceramics returns to Montelupo Fiorentino

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