“Rehang” at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia
Collezione Maramotti opened in 2007 to house the impressive art collection of Achille Maramotti, founder of the fashion brand Max Mara. This March, for the first time since its opening to the public, Maramotti’s permanent collection – still hosted in the former Max Mara headquarters in Reggio Emilia – has changed its look.
Collezione Maramotti, the art collection initiated by Max Mara’s founder Achille Maramotti in the 1950s, has recently changed its look. Hosted in the former headquarters of the Italian fashion brand in Reggio Emilia, the permanent collection – comprising works from 1945 to the present by both Italian and international artists, from Art Informel and the Transavanguardia to the most recent currents – is now seen in a brand-new display. Last March, for the first time since the opening of the collection to the public in 2007, ten rooms on the second floor have been reorganized in keeping with a “historiographic” principle: mapping the history of the Maramotti acquisitions over the last 12 years through ten seminal projects by ten different artists, displayed as a series of small solo exhibitions. A “rehang” that represents an opportunity for reflection on the collection and its growth.
The new display’s main focus is certainly painting, whose evolution as a medium through the years has always been a major interest for Achille and the Maramotti family. Among the projects for “Rehang” is a room devoted to French-American artist Jules de Balincourt, who in 2012 showed a new body of five paintings (“Parallel Universe”) at Collezione Maramotti, exploring the relationship between abstraction, representation and painterly gesture. One of the results of this pictorial investigation is Psychedelic Soldier, a self-portrait of the artist as a military man, originating from a desire to take a closer look at the technique of camouflage. Three large canvases by Alessandro Pessoli, originally exhibited at the collection in 2011, take the complex subject of the Crucifixion as their starting point, combining a miscellany of classic pictorial compositions and themes with references to the history of painting, from Metaphysics to Surrealism.
Portraiture is represented with mastery by two women artists, Chantal Joffe and Alessandra Ariatti, both featured in Reggio Emilia in the 2014 show “Portrait of Women.” While Joffe’s works from the “Moll” series depict a single figure – the 16-year-old artist’s
niece – using fluid and liquid brushstrokes, Ariatti’s paintings show groups of men and women, usually belonging to the same family or social milieu, through hyper-photographic precision, with the purpose of in-depth psychological investigation. Among the other artists in the new show are Enoc Perez, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Jacob Kassay, Krištof Kintera, Evgeny Antufiev, and Thomas Scheibitz. A temporary exhibition on the ground floor (“Rehang: Archives”, until July 28) offers further insight into the history of the acquisitions. Featuring artist’s books and catalogues, letters, sketches, photographs and videos taken from the collection’s library and archives, it documents the various stages of creation of specific works that are now part of the collection, including projects by indisputable protagonists of 20th-century art (Claudio Parmiggiani, Enzo Cucchi, and Vito Acconci, for instance) as well as younger and mid-career artists, such as Jason Dodge and Krištof Kintera.
“Rehang” (from March 3) and “Rehang: Archives” (through July 28). Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia.