Flora Commedia, Cai Guo-Qiang's contemporary art arrives at the Uffizi.

The Uffizi Galleries announce Flora Commedia, a solo exhibition by contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang (Quanzhou, 1957), open from November 20, 2018 to February 17, 2019. The exhibition, co-curated by Eike Schimdt, director of the Uffizi, with Laura Donati, curator of the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Uffizi Galleries, will be mounted in the ten galleries connected to the Caravaggio rooms in the main body of the Uffizi. A total of about sixty works will be on display: paintings of various sizes made with gunpowder, as well as a selection of the artist’s sketches illustrating his creative process. On Sunday, Nov. 18, from Piazzale Michelangelo the City of Flowers in the Sky performance of daytime fireworks created by Cai Guo-Qiang, inspired by Renaissance flora and Botticelli’s Primavera, spectacularly revealed the exhibition.

Flora Commedia stems from Cai Guo-Qiang’s visit to the Uffizi in 2017: the Boboli Gardens of the former Medici family, the Pitti Palace, and the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints. The artist uses flowers as a medium to express today the spirit of the Renaissance, desire and pleasures, connection with nature, and the awakening of humanity and body perception.

The exhibition is part of a larger project Journey of an Individual through the History of Western Art, and after exhibitions at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Museo Prado in Madrid in 2017, the artist comes to Florence. In 2019, he will continue at the Archaeological Museum in Naples and conclude in the East where he will present the fruit of this long journey.

Involving different aspects of the artist’s creation, the exhibition relates the daytime explosion of fireworks in the city and the moment when he sets fire to his paintings on canvas made with gunpowder. Cai’s painting technique, refined and complex, establishes an exchange with Nature, relating to the great Renaissance masters whose works are housed in the Uffizi and generating a reflection on the meaning of art.
In the first gallery, connected to the Caravaggio Room, the four self-portraits on display reflect the tradition of self-portraits in the Uffizi Galleries’ prestigious collection. In the second room, the Renaissance Garden, the works installed as a picture gallery evoke the arrangement of the Medici family’s collection. Most of the forty works on display here are simply flowers. The purity of this theme allowed the artist to boldly experiment with traditional and innovative techniques: the technique of painting by incense sticks and that of silver-tipped drawings, which Cai Guo-Qiang learned at the Uffizi Drawing Department. Inspired by a 16th-century erotic book, the painting I Modi depicts on a large canvas the sixteen positions illustrated separately in the original book. While the painting Study of birds was made as a tribute to Leonardo da Vinci on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death.

“Looking at the paintings of the great masters, you still feel a warmth that comes from the spirit of making art today and in the past. Do we still have this warmth today that we can pass on to our successors? I want to believe so,” adds Cai Guo-Qiang. In the preface to the exhibition, curators Eike Schmidt and Laura Donati comment, “Between the quest to master natural elements, fire first and foremost, and the quest to unleash creativity and the desire to lose control on the part of man, Cai Guo-Qiang stands right in the middle between the East and the West. It is an opportunity for the Uffizi Galleries to reflect through a contemporary perspective across geographical and temporal boundaries.”

As for the City of Flowers in the Sky event, the artist created a 24-meter work using gunpowder on hemp paper to capture the atmosphere and frame the structure of this show in a gunpowder drawing so that it would become the masterpiece of the Flora Commedia exhibition. The artist explained, “the fireworks are reminiscent of thousands of Renaissance-like flowers, while at the same time evoking the palettes of the Renaissance masters. The Uffizi’s sumptuous collection seems to emerge from its architecture, merging at one with the city that nurtures it.”

Germano Celant writes in his text in the catalog, “all his making manifests the elaboration of a transition between distinct moments, so much so that everything is in evolution: from drawing to event, from image to reality, from darkness to light.”

The Flora Commedia exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Giunti editore (with editions in Italian, English and Chinese) that includes essays by Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi Galleries, curator Germano Celant, art historian Sir Simon Schama, Flora Commedia co-curator Laura Donati and the artist himself. At the end of his essay, Sir Simon Schama states that “all great works of art are results of difficult negotiations between the artist who idea and the media who resist, although Cai has always been modest in saying that gunpowder, smoke, fire and light could and should also be free from his design, but the truth is that, like all true geniuses, his thinking is the only source of ignition.”

Three documentaries directed by Xia Shanshan reveal the artist’s perseverance, vulnerability, uncertainty and self-criticism during this journey through painting.

On the opening day, a meeting was held for the exhibition Flora Commedia at theVasari Auditorium of the Uffizi Galleries. Together with the artist, speakers included Eike D. Schmidt, Laura Donati, Simon Schama, art critic and professor at Columbia University, and Renata Pintus, official and art historian. The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the City of Florence, Mr. and Mrs. Silas Chou, Mr. and Mrs. Cheung Chung Kiu, Mr. David Su together withART CARE Art Consultant co., Ltd. and the Shanghai International Culture Association.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Uffizi.

Pictured: Cai Guo-Qiang, Renaissance Flower Garden (2018; gunpowder on canvas, 300x400 cm).

Flora Commedia, Cai Guo-Qiang's contemporary art arrives at the Uffizi.

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