On Saturday 31 October 2026 at 6 pm, Centro Pecci welcomes Emilio Isgrò, a leading figure in Italian conceptual art and one of the artists featured in ROTTE.
On the eve of the exhibition’s closing, the talk offers an opportunity to explore his artistic practice and revisit his connections with Prato and the museum, whose collection has been enriched by twelve of his works through Carlo Palli’s donation.
Joining the artist:
Carlo Palli, collector and donor; Stefano Pezzato, curator of the exhibition and Head of Collections and Archives at Centro Pecci; and Marco Bazzini, art critic, Artistic Director of Centro Pecci from 2007 to 2013 and now Scientific Director of the Archivio Emilio Isgrò.
Emilio Isgrò’s Books
During the talk, Emilio Isgrò will also discuss his two most recent books: L’avventurosa vita di Emilio Isgrò (Interlinea, 2025), an ironic and contradictory portrait constructed through 328 imaginary testimonies, and Io non cancello. La mia vita fraintesa, written with Chiara Gatti (Solferino, 2024), an autobiography weaving together his personal life and artistic practice, tracing sixty years of erasures. Both books will be available at the museum bookshop.
Emilio Isgrò (born in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Messina, in 1937; lives and works in Milan) is a conceptual artist and painter, as well as a poet, writer, playwright and director, and one of the most internationally recognised figures in Italian art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the 1960s, his “erasures” have formed the basis of a groundbreaking and original body of work, earning him appearances at the Venice Biennale (1972, 1978, 1986, 1993) and first prize at the São Paulo Biennial (1977).
In 2008, Centro Pecci in Prato hosted a major retrospective of his work, Dichiaro di essere Emilio Isgrò, curated by its then Artistic Director, Marco Bazzini. In 2010, as part of Istanbul’s programme as European Capital of Culture, he presented the retrospective Var ve yok (There and Not There) at Taksim Sanat Galerisi, also curated by Marco Bazzini.
In 2014, he conceived and took centre stage in Maledetti toscani, benedetti italiani, a three-part project for the city of Prato curated by Stefano Pezzato. The project saw him portray Curzio Malaparte on stage at Teatro Metastasio, create erasures of eleven illustrious Tuscans exhibited at Museo di Palazzo Pretorio (two of which are now on display at the Lazzerini Library), and produce the artist’s video Le api di Lipari, which entered Centro Pecci’s collection. Alongside the Prato project, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence acquired his landmark 1971 self-portrait, Dichiaro di non essere Emilio Isgrò.
Carlo Palli’s donation adds twelve works by Isgrò to Centro Pecci’s collection: from the Libri cancellati of the early 1970s and the conceptual canvases of 1971 and 1974 to the large black painted panels of 2003 and the painted triptych dedicated to Magna Graecia from 2006.
In recent years, the artist has written Io non cancello. La mia vita fraintesa (with Chiara Gatti, Solferino, Milan, 2024), in which he looks back on sixty years of erasures, and L’avventurosa vita di Emilio Isgrò, nelle testimonianze di uomini di stato, artisti, scrittori, parlamentari, attori, parenti, familiari, amici, anonimi cittadini (Interlinea, Novara, 2025), in which he revisits his personal history through the perspectives of others.
