Luigi Mainolfi's Foot will soon enter the permanent collection of Faenza's MIC

The International Museum of Ceramics (MIC) in Faenza is among the 40 projects selected for PAC2024 - Plan for Contemporary Art, an initiative promoted by the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity. This project involves a total investment of 3.5 million euros for the acquisition, production and enhancement of contemporary art works destined for the Italian public heritage. Among the selected projects, seven are in Emilia Romagna, and the MIC in Faenza is one of them.

The MIC obtained funding for the acquisition of The Foot (1983), an important work by sculptor Luigi Mainolfi, an internationally renowned artist known for his poetic research expressed through terracotta. His works explore cultural memory and human origins, with a particular focus on his homeland, Campania. Terracotta, for Mainolfi, becomes a means to reflect on the “mother earth” of all civilizations and human archetypes, reinterpreted in a contemporary, poetic and elegant key.

The acquisition of The Foot is particularly significant for MIC, which boasts an international collection of contemporary sculpture. Although Mainolfi has been exhibited several times at the museum, until now there was no work of his in the collection. The purchase of this sculpture, historicized in the 1980s, completes the exhibition devoted to that decade, a crucial period for the return of terracotta and ceramics to contemporary art. The foot will be placed in dialogue with the works of other important artists such as Nanni Valentini, Pino Spagnulo and Carlo Zauli, already in the MIC collection, all of whom contributed significantly to the poetics of those years.

"Of The Foot,“ Mainolfi himself writes, ”sometimes I miss the parts of the earth during flight, the details blur, I get closer and distinguish the forests, the waters, the roar of a volcano spitting life into history, the art of the lands. I sense the breath of the mountains where man has always found, in his skin, a cave in which to think and dream, and I wrap myself in the sculpture of the air, in the fire of art."

Luigi Mainolfi's Foot will soon enter the permanent collection of Faenza's MIC

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