A new contemporary art museum opens in Sicily . It is the MACC - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea del Carmine di Scicli (Ragusa), inaugurated this morning with a major anthological exhibition by Emilio Isgrò (Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, 1937). The Work of Ants, this is the title of the exhibition, represents not only the official opening of the museum space, but also the return of contemporary art to a land deeply rooted in Mediterranean culture, reinterpreted with strength and originality by one of its greatest protagonists.
The MACC finds a home inside the former Carmine Convent, a space recovered thanks to funds from the so-called 1990 Earthquake Law and a grant from the Ministry of Culture. Today, this place returned to the community opens its doors with one of the most significant exhibitions in recent years in Sicily. The choice of Emilio Isgrò, an internationally renowned Sicilian artist, is not accidental: born in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto in 1937, Isgrò has built a visual poetics based on the technique of erasure, through which he has been able to rewrite language and redesign the meaning of words and memory.
Presenting the project was the mayor of Scicli, Mario Marino, who stressed the importance of the opening of the MACC as a new center of cultural production and fruition. The exhibition, curated by Marco Bazzini and Bruno Corà, offers a comprehensive survey of Isgrò’s work beginning in the 1960s, when the artist, after an initial period as a poet, began to try his hand at visual art. It is 1962 when Isgrò makes his first “newspaper articles,” the starting point of a long creative journey that will lead him to elaborate, two years later, the first erasures, works-manifesto of his visual language.
The exhibition itinerary also includes the “enlarged details” and “extracted letters” of the 1970s, up to the celebrated erased books, such as The Leopard (1976), and the more recent Ottoman Codes of 2010. An itinerary that continues to the closest years, with red erasures and pictograms that bring out a new phase in the artist’s painting. Works such as Palm, The Sea of Odysseus and Fisherman testify to this evolution and Isgrò’s ability to continually renew himself. The fulcrum of the exhibition, however, is the previously unseen installation The Work of Ants, which gives the title to the entire exhibition project. It is a monumental work that occupies the large central corridor of the museum and then symbolically spills out into the urban space of Scicli. Baskets filled with golden carobs, a symbol of abundance and territorial rootedness, are crossed by a horde of ants: a visual metaphor for the industrious community and collective intelligence. Isgrò’s ants do not stop at the walls of the museum, but invade the square in front, establishing a continuous dialogue between inside and outside, between work and context.
The artist himself explained the choice this way, “I am an Italian and Sicilian artist, a citizen of a Europe that needs non-aligned art to make a contribution that is not purely decorative to a world in turmoil. So I thought of this Work of Ants as a sign of a Sicily true to itself that nevertheless knows when the time has come for change. No more prickly pear or puppet opera, no more Sicilianist rhetoric, but humble ants offering their industrious intelligence in support of a country that must enter Europe in one piece if it wants to weigh anything.”
There are numerous works on display from private and institutional collections. Prominent among them are some works from the Gallerie d’Italia - Intesa Sanpaolo, such as Non schiacciatemi per favore, created for the Amplifon Foundation, sponsor of the exhibition, testifying to the value of kindness. Also featured will be the new installation Don’t Kill, now part of the permanent collection at MAXXI in Rome. The work, created by Isgrò together with architect Mario Botta, is a tribute to the universal principles of civil coexistence, embodied in the constitutions of every people. Further embellishing the exhibition is La lumière de la Liberté, an intense and visionary sculpture first exhibited in Paris in 2017.
The exhibition remains open to the public from May 6 to Nov. 3, 2025, with continuous hours from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and an entrance fee of 12 euros. Also accompanying the exhibition is a catalog published by Allemandi Editore, containing texts by the curators, a contribution by the artist and a photographic documentation of the installation. The volume will be presented soon at one of the events planned in the rich calendar of the MACC, which aims to become a stable point of reference for contemporary art in Sicily.
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| A new contemporary art museum in Sicily: MACC opens today in Scicli |
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