At the end of the exhibition Re-thinking the sculture by Mauro Staccioli, made for the return of the great work Prato 88, Tuesday January 6th 2026 at 4pm the Pecci Centre presents with the Mauro Staccioli archive three documentary films on the artist and his work, in connection with the “Rete del Contemporaneo in Toscana e arte ambientale diffusa” project.
The screenings will be introduced by some introductory speeches by:
- Andrea Alibrandi, director of the Mauro Staccioli Archive Association
- Duccio Benvenuti, director and writer
- Caterina Martinelli, director of the Mauro Staccioli museum archive in Volterra
- Stefano Pezzato, head of collection and archives at the Pecci Centre in Prato
Screening program
Mauro Staccioli. Luoghi d’esperienza (Volterra, 2009)
Directed by Duccio Benvenuti, 20 min. 30 sec.
The exhibition project of Mauro Staccioli. Volterra – Luoghi d’esperienza (september-november 2009) ideally originatest from his personal exhibition Sculture in città, organised in Volterra in July 1972 and curated by Enrico Crispolti. At that moment Staccioli defines his way of making sculpture, focuses his attention on urban life and environment, thus taking an important step towards a new way of conceiving it.
From that exhibition project, it ws possible to preserve the large sculptural interventions in the landscape through which the artist, originally from Volterra, manages to create a dialogue with the entire territory of the city, highlighting times and places of a landscape in which history, culture, and human labor meet his personal memory.
Mauro Staccioli. Museo Archivio (Volterra, 2024)
Video by Francesco Castellani, 8 min. 24 sec.
From January 20 2025 is opened in Volterra the Mauro Staccioli. Museum Archive, that is permanently housed in the rooms of the former Oratory of the Crucifix, within the complex of Santa Maria Maddalena Exhibition and Study Centre, made available by the Cassa Risparmio di Volterra Foundation. The exhibition of around forty plastic projects, among the many created over the years by Staccioli for the study, verification and presentation of his sculptures, set within urban places or in natural contexts, it is flanked by an interactive touch screen specifically designed to trace, through archive documents, sketches, preparatory drawings, digitized project photomontages, the artist’s large sculptures in Italy and abroad.
Mauro Staccioli. Opere 2025
Video by Francesco Castellani, 12 min. 14 sec.
Staccioli claimed to “construct an idea like constructing a building; to think of the space of its material realization as an opportunity for reading and imaginative hypotheses of the environmental context”. Besides in Prato and Volterra, his permanente works are found in Milan, Bergamo, Santa Sofia in Romagna, Pesaro, San Casciano Val di Pesa, Impruneta and Greve in Chianti, San Giovanni Valdarno, Capalbio in Maremma, Tortolì and Ozieri in Sardinia, in front of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. For “Fiumara d’arte” in Sicily, the artist has built a corten steel Pyramid on the 38th Parallel.
Mauro Staccioli was Born in 1937 in Volterra, where he graduated in 1954 at the Art Institute. In 1960 he moved to Sardinia where he taught, then in 1963 he moved to Lodi and then to Milan where he became director of the Art High School of Brera in 1974/75 and 1978/79 and of the State Art High School of Lovere (BG).
The beginnings of his artistic career are interwined with his teaching experience and political activism. From the late 1960s, he devoted himself to sculpture, developing the idea of a close relationship with the place where the work is located. In the 1970s he created “intervention-sculptures” characterised by essential geometry and the use of simple materials such as concrete and iron. In the 1980s his research lost its harshness and aggressiveness, to openly challenge space by subverting static and dimensional balances. He thus began to work on the relationship between sign and landscape, a theme that characterizes his most famous monumental works. Staccioli passed away in 2018 in Milan, leaving behind his archive presided over by his daughter Giulia and directed by Andrea Alibrandi.