Florence, contemporary art returns to Piazza della Signoria: site-specific work by Francesco Vezzoli

From Oct. 2, 2021, Francesco Vezzoli will bring two new sculptures to Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio in Florence as part of the Francesco Vezzoli in Florence project, curated by Cristiana Perrella, director of the Centro Pecci in Prato, and Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento in Florence. The project, carried out under the patronage of the City of Florence and organized by Mus.e, will bring contemporary art and the historical and artistic heritage of the Tuscan capital into dialogue.

After Jan Fabre, Urs Fisher, Jeff Koons and Giuseppe Penone, contemporary art will arrive in Piazza della Signoria with Francesco Vezzoli, the first living Italian artist to create asite-specific work for the central Florentine square.

After his exhibition in the city in 2014, the artist returns to Florence to present in Piazza della Signoria a monumental 20th-century lion rampant, installed on an ancient plinth, crushing in its jaws a Roman head from the second century A.D., in a pastiche between different artistic eras. Inside the Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Vezzoli will place a “metaphysical” bronze head, a quotation from De Chirico’s The Archaeologists, on a figure of a Roman togatus.

Compared to the Renaissance restorations, Vezzoli fits into the conceptual path of De Chirico and Savinio, inventors of metamorphosis and mysterious collages, and instead of seeking formal harmony, he composes puzzling hybrids, linguistic collages that regenerate the forms of tradition but have a life of their own. A surreal world made of archaeology and fantasy, memory and invention, where classical culture becomes matter to be broken down and recomposed, to be made relevant in the present, finding in the hybridization with other themes, other epochs, the cue for artistic reflection on topics such as identity, authorship, and on how to remember the past, without denying or erasing it.

After Francesco Vezzoli’s intervention in Florence, the Pecci Center in Prato will dedicate a solo exhibition to the artist from February 2022.

Florence, contemporary art returns to Piazza della Signoria: site-specific work by Francesco Vezzoli

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