CENTRO PECCI exhibitions

COLORESCENZE
Artiste, Toscana, Futuro (Women artists, Tuscany, Future)

curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Elena Magini

From June 28 to October 13, 2024

opening: Thursday 27 June 2024

Women artists featured in the exhibition:

Francesca Banchelli, Chiara Bettazzi, Chiara Camoni, Giulia Cenci, Isabella Costabile, Daniela De Lorenzo, Helena Hladilová, Christiane Löhr, Lucia Marcucci, Margherita Moscardini, Moira Ricci, Sandra Tomboloni 

Centro Pecci presents the exhibition Colorescenze. Artiste, Toscana, Futuro, curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Elena Magini, from June 28 to October 13, 2024.

The exhibition brings together twelve women artists, Tuscan by origin or adoption, belonging to different generations and engaged in the production of new forms and new imagery with materials often collected in the local area, always capable of suggesting unexpected tools and words to build the future. The title is illustrative: a word inspired by a collage by Lucia Marcucci that seems to unite-through reference to color and knowledge (knowledge in Italian is “conoscenza”)- different but nowhere nearer universes: art, science, and wisdom. In the contemporary art system, this group of extraordinary women artists tells of the uniqueness of the Tuscan context, characterized by a widespread presence of creativity that sets it apart from the concentration of other Italian regions.
 
The choice to live in places that are isolated or far from the main art circuits is reflected in the desire to confront a situated knowledge, that is, a knowledge that takes its cue from one's everyday life. The works draw life from the communities of reference, from available materials-natural or artificial, from the possibility of collaborating with artisans and from a dialogical relationship with the landscape. Sharing knowledge to overcome the fragility of the individual, fathoming and reconstructing apocalypses with no fear but with precision and peaks of irreverence, constructing forms concurrently minimalist and baroque, creating alliances between species, of monstrous beings and fantastic stories-all these actions invite a unique experience of time, space and speech.

In the halls of the Gamberini Wing of Centro Pecci, one can experience an unprecedented immersion in the capacity of a shared territory to evoke different experiences, responding to personal attitudes and unalike one single matrix, bearing witness to an alternative way of making art to the established male models. In a historical phase characterized by hydrogeological disasters, global warming, and land pollution, caring for the recovery and reassembly of materials and knowledge becomes an important antidote to a future of decline and despair that appears already written. The Italian processual tradition meets the considerations on language developed by feminist groups in the 1970s, giving rise to an alternative canon, ostensibly at odds with a system of values and knowledge that in Italy appeared incontrovertibly given. Colorescenze. Artiste, Toscana, Futuro collects the legacy of this joyful, self-aware, and angry culture of otherness, writing an unforgettable page in the history of Centro Pecci, a testament to how contemporary art can help us think of new world models useful for confronting the future.
 
The choice to present the works of a group of women artists pertaining to the regional context responds to the distinctive role of Centro Pecci and Fondazione per le Arti Contemporanee in Toscana as the coordinating body of artistic production in the region: in this light, the need arose to investigate possible forms of planning specifically for the region, thanks to the voices of the women artists who inhabit it. Their artistic re-elaboration allows a practical reflection on how to imagine a new system of thinking and acting, through resistance practices and regenerative imaginaries, capable of projecting us into the near future.
 

Cover: Installation view, Colorescenze, 2024. Courtesy Centro Pecci Prato ©photo Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio