Bologna, Alfredo Pirri transforms Palazzo Boncompagni into a living work of art

Until April 30, 2025 Palazzo Boncompagni hosts Alfredo Pirri. Ritratto di Palazzo, an exhibition conceived and created by the artist with works mostly made specifically for the sixteenth-century Bolognese palace, one of the architectural jewels of the city, home of Pope Gregory XIII, known among other things for having introduced the Gregorian calendar. Alfredo Pirri in this case has arranged his translucent forms in the rooms, creating an unprecedented “portrait of the Palace,” hence the title of an exhibition that winds its way from the Sala Del Papa to the loggia, from the side rooms to the three new rooms opened on the ground floor, just returned to exhibition use, to the Scala del Vignola.

Curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Silvia Evangelisti, the exhibition presents about forty works, anthological and site-specific, reflecting in all its spaces the central elements of Pirri’s art - time light space and form - that live in harmony with the environments that host them. The artist’s installations, sculptures, sketches, architectural models, paintings and drawings literally inhabit the Palazzo, reflected in it just as the Palazzo is reflected in the works. Pirri in fact builds an immersive experience in which the place, with its history and architectural charm, becomes a protagonist on a par with the artist’s works. Reinforcing this symbiosis is the choice to make the artist’s archive an integral part of the exhibition, emphasizing the circular nature of time and ideas for an exhibition that represents an intense dialogue between architecture, memory and perception, not just a tribute to the past, but a way to keep it alive and relevant in the present, to be experienced in a conscious and open way.

The exhibition is divided into rooms that turn into acts of a narrative. The itinerary opens with the installation Passi, made several times by the artist in a way that is always different in relation to the place, one of which was precisely in Bologna, during Arte Fiera 2005, in the hypogeum of Villa Guastavillani, the residence of Cardinal Filippo Guastavillani, whose mother Giacoma was sister of Ugo Boncompagni, Pope Gregory XIII, who appointed him cardinal in the consistory of 1574. The installation, in this case, takes life in the Papal Hall of Palazzo Boncompagni, with its splendid frescoes, and changes its perception, creating new visions and unprecedented emotions. The floor of shattered mirrors, created with a performance in which the owner of the Palazzo, Paola Pizzighini Benelli, was the protagonist, along with the artist, reflects the grotesques and paintings on the ceiling. The installation invades the space, multiplies and divides it, reverses perspectives, reverses high and low, breaks the vision and recomposes it. It stops time while multiplying it in this symbolically evoking the time of Pope Gregory, who “created,” with his calendar, modern time.

The itinerary continues in the three small rooms, red, yellow and green that flank the hall, where the first room, more intimate and design-oriented, shows the preparatory sketches for “Steps,” while the other two display works that expand in space, with large graffiti panels and the watercolors that represent the creation of thework as if the artist wished to share with visitors the genesis of his installation, visually recounting the idea that presides over it and the different steps that followed until its realization.

The artist’s vision is expressed by Cure, a burnished copper maquette/sculpture that welcomes visitors to the exhibition, a sculptural model of the installation exhibited at the 1988 Venice Biennale. The “portrait” continues in the large loggia, an open space where the forms are “architectural structures” that, far from invading it, experience the same airiness as the Loggia. Resting on the precious Venetian floor, Pirri’s works, some pre-existing others specially created, create a visual and emotional path of colors and iridescent refractions, so as to perceptively scan the time of the place through different sculptural presences but with each other in perfect harmony. Natural light becomes an accomplice to the work, varying perception according to the time of day. The light architecture of the model Sculpture Companions and Angels and the gentle geometry of Le jardin féerique - poetic “fairy garden” of overlapping sheets of Plexiglas that enclose a multitude of feathers - join the sculpture built for the exhibition Arie for Palazzo Boncompagni, with the large sheets of colored glass and natural feathers creating a sort of hortus conclusus. The path then arrives at the evocative Project for a Red Interior, a sort of “magic box” that from a distance appears as a rigorous geometric structure but reveals its secret when you get closer and look inside: here opens up a large red square populated with people, red too, sized to the scale of the square, an imaginary project of a large open space one kilometer on each side.

“Since the 1980s, in Pirri’s early works are ’objects of reflection’ on time, on light, on space, on how each element interferes with the other, on the mutation that light operates on space, on how this interacts with time, in its most concrete dimension: the passing of life,” says curator Silvia Evangelisti, “The research of the artist-architect Pirri, is the bearer of a very particular esprit de geométrie: the rationality of the mind is ”contaminated“ by the emotionality of color; the physical occupation of space is lightened by the levity of the air that seems to make feathers float; the certainty of forms is challenged by the diaphanous luminescence of materials. And all to create that special condition we call harmony: harmony of the parts with the whole, of each individual work with the others, and of all of them with the architecture and decorations of the historic building that houses them.”

Fundamental to this construction is the installation RWD-FWD, a work-in-progress exhibited for the first time in the three new rooms on the ground floor of Palazzo Boncompagni, called Boncompagnina, which have just been returned to exhibition use. Formerly occupied by archives, these spaces now return to house a very special one, which Pirri has been creating for years as a testimony to his entire artistic activity, collecting since the 1980s, more than 1,500 documents of all kinds (photographs, projects, preparatory drawings, catalogs, articles, posters) related to his life as an artist. A choice that may appear singular, in a time connoted by information technology: but in reality RWD-FWD is not only an archive, it is a self-portrait in the making, a gesture of preservation and transformation that reflects Alfredo Pirri’s way of being, his continuous research on method and time, the culmination of the dialogue between memory and future. Also an integral part of the artistic project is the video installation Ritratto di Palazzo con signora, which documents the performance carried out by the artist together with the owner of the Palazzo, Paola Pizzighini Benelli, who is the protagonist in a powerful and symbolic gesture: the breaking of the floor of mirrors in the Sala Del Papa, accompanied by Pirri in the role of “stage servant.”

Produced on the occasion of the thirteenth edition of Art City Bologna (Feb. 6 -16, 2025) the program of exhibitions, events and initiatives promoted by the City of Bologna on the occasion of Arte Fiera (Feb. 7-9, 2025), the exhibition is promoted and organized by Fondazione Palazzo Boncompagni in collaboration with Galleria Cavour 1959 with the support of Emil Banca and Doria, insurance and social security solutions since 1957, under the patronage of the City of Bologna.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Palazzo Boncompagni.

Bologna, Alfredo Pirri transforms Palazzo Boncompagni into a living work of art

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