Author Description

This exhibition reflects on the overall theme of the city between utopian and dystopian visions, offering an intense journey recounting desired cities, utopias, metropolises and human landscapes imagined by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Opening with Case in costruzione by Umberto Boccioni, the show/ journey delineates the city as a living organism in constant evolution between cultural memory, as in Piazza d'Italia by Giorgio De Chirico, and imperatively current interpretations, as in Firenze III/XII by Gerhard Richter. Painters, sculptors, photographers and musicians have been summoned to give life with their works to the global symphony of the city orchestrated by literature which from Calvino to Borges has always been generous with ideas and images. From Sol LeWitt to Michelangelo Pistoletto, from Alberto Burri to architects, among them Le Corbusier, Stefano Boeri, Rem Koolhaas, Pietro Porcinai, Giovanni Michelucci, and Antonio Sant'Elia, on to photographers like Mimmo Jodice, Luigi Ghirri, and Olivo Barbieri, accompanied by composers Daniele Lombardi, Giuseppe Chiari, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna who have given the city a voice. Added to all this is the documentary produced for this event by Francesco Castellani, offering important reflections on cinema. 126 works, 126 visions offer themselves up to visitors' eyes with their view of the many, sometimes discordant urban identities, always and in any case striving to overcome the innate limits of the organism of the city.