Exhibitions 2023: Olafur Eliasson and Others Not to Miss

This week’s 2023 exhibitions open with Olafur Eliasson In His Time at Palazzo Strozzi.

From Florence to Modena where Ligabue is featured, to Treviso with Paris Bordon, to Perugia showcasing Canova and finally to Bassano del Grappa where POL Polloniato presents The Timeless White.

Here are the exhibitions in Italy in 2023!

Olafur Eliasson In His Time at Palazzo Strozzi until January 22, 2023

The 2023 exhibitions begin at Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, where Olafur Eliasson In Your Time has just opened, the largest exhibition ever held in Italy focused on the Danish artist.

With lights and shadows, reflections and colors, Olafur Eliasson engages Renaissance architecture in a captivating journey of historical works and new productions, including a large site-specific installation for the courtyard and a special digital art project created using VR technology, presented to the public for the first time at Palazzo Strozzi.

Olafur Eliasson In Your Time transforms the Renaissance palace into a dynamic body where architectural elements such as windows, ceilings, corners, and walls become protagonists through interventions of light, screens, mirrors, or colored filters. Eliasson thus presents a plurality of possible narratives with the aim of a new perspective.

Antonio Ligabue at the Galleria Collezione e Archivio Storico di BPER Banca until February 5, 2023

The BPER Banca Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Antonio Ligabue, titled “Antonio Ligabue. The Hour Without Shadow. Recognition as an Artist and as a Person”.

The exhibition will develop from four important paintings belonging to the BPER Banca art collection along with a selection of works from private collections, representing the main themes that Antonio Ligabue dedicated himself to: from the relentless struggles between wild animals to self-portraits, to scenes of work in the fields, where the realities of sight and memories of the lost homeland merge.

Titled “Antonio Ligabue. The Hour Without Shadow. Recognition as an Artist and as a Person”, the exhibition addresses the theme of the twenty-second edition of festivalfilosofia – Justice – in reference to the artist’s biographical events, from exile from Switzerland to forced hospitalizations in psychiatric wards.

Paris Bordon 1500 – 1571 Divine Painter at the Museo di Santa Caterina until January 15, 2023

Paris Bordon 1500 – 1571 Divine Painter is on display at the Museum of Santa Caterina in Treviso until January 15, 2023. Paris Bordon is also known as the “Divine Painter,” a term used only for Raphael and Titian.

The exhibition is the largest monographic display ever created so far, featuring exceptional works, many of which are exhibited in Italy for the first time.

Paris Bordon 1500 – 1571 brings together 41 works, including 34 masterpieces among paintings and some drawings by Paris Bordon, presented alongside testimonies from Pietro Aretino, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, Luigi Lanzi, Carlo Ridolfi, Giorgio Vasari, which attest to the painter’s critical fortune.

The loans come from the most prestigious museums in the world, including the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, and the Vatican Museums. The path is divided into eight thematic sections that retrace the variety and originality of the themes of the Treviso genius, from Sacred Conversations to drawings, from sensual female and male portraits to mythological representations, from sacred scenes of large altarpieces to small works intended for private devotion. All seasons of the painter are documented, starting from youthful testimonies marked by the influence of Titian to the very personal ones of maturity.

In the Time of Canova at Palazzo Baldeschi until November 1, 2022

Perugia pays tribute to Canova with an exhibition-itinerary between Palazzo Baldeschi and the MUSA, Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts.

The exhibition, titled In the Time of Canova, focuses on the core of the Canovian plasters preserved at the MUSA, Museum of the Academy of Perugia – among which The Three Graces, donated by the sculptor himself in 1822 – the exhibition enhances the artistic and cultural context within which these works were inserted, narrating an Umbria inscribed in broader dynamics and a vibrant network of relationships.

Many novelties are present in this exhibition conceived as a journey through time, with over one hundred works that will tell the story of “the sister arts” in an era that, despite the great upheavals of History, or perhaps precisely because of them, cultivated Beauty: sculpture, architecture, painting, even in the papal and Napoleonic Umbria, were part of that “happy revolution of the arts” that had Canova as the absolute protagonist.

The itinerary of the exhibition – both real and ideal – proceeds around the works and the protagonists of a season culminated in the particularly influential bond that Canova had between 1812 and 1822 with the Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia, which he guided in its choices, supporting the appointment of directors such as Carlo Labruzzi, Tommaso Minardi, Giovanni Sanguinetti.

POL Polloniato The Timeless White at Palazzo Sturm until February 26, 2023

The Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa present, until February 26, POL Polloniato The Timeless White at Palazzo Sturm.
An exhibition project by the artist POL Polloniato, heir and protagonist of the centuries-old ceramic tradition of the territory of Nove and Bassano del Grappa.

POL Polloniato The Timeless White collects and showcases to the public the last fifteen years of the artist’s research, featuring a series of ceramic art works, presented in the form of installations, paying homage to the great sculptor Antonio Canova, with white, as both color and material, being the common denominator.

The exhibition, set up in the rooms on the fourth floor of Palazzo Sturm, speaks through selected groups of works about the history of the territory, its aesthetic context and production, the heritage of civic collections, the evolution of taste, styles, and sculptural languages, where the “plastic boundaries” have literally been burned with ceramics in this geography.