‘We Love Art‘ is an innovative project by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, which, in partnership with the Fondazione Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), has created an initiative that combines both creativity and business, art and Made in Italy.
For the first time, the Ministry has thus turned to businesses to establish a partnership in the field of the production of contemporary works of art, in order to support young Italian artists affected by the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis, enhancing their talent and increasing their visibility abroad.
Curators Ludovico Pratesi and Marco Bassan selected 8 artists under-35, who developed an original art project for ‘We Love Art’. In the process, each artist was supported by Fondazione CDP and could benefit of the collaboration of one of the 8 companies, owned by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti: Open Fiber, Terna, Eni, Webuild, CDP Immobiliare, Snam, Tim, Ansaldo Energia.
The works produced, using mediums ranging from sculpture, to painting and photography, will be exhibited abroad in collaboration with the Consulate General of Italy in Chongqing, and with the five Italian Cultural Institutes of Seoul, New York, Mexico City, Cairo and Berlin, in a geographical itinerary that start off in South Korea travel to China, the United States, Mexico, Egypt and Germany.
At the end of the exhibition, the eight works of art will become part of the permanent collection of the Fondazione Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.
The project was conceived with wide-ranging and diversified objectives: to improve the relationship between art and business and its great expressive potential through a targeted artistic assignments, backed by some of the country’s leading companies; to take up the legacy of patronage, a phenomenon that has always been linked to art and the development of Italian society, and to its delve into its contemporary manifestations.
Two fundamental examples of dialogue between artistic creativity and industrial production have served as inspiration for ‘We Love Art’: ‘Civiltà delle Macchine’ (Civilization of the Machines) and ‘Sculture nella città’ (Sculptures in the City). The former, a famous magazine founded in 1953 by Leonardo Sinisgalli, conveyed the interaction between art and technique for many years, at a time when industry was calling on art and culture to describe the processes of social change during the economic miracle of the 1960s through ‘factory visits’. The second experience, the exhibition ‘Sculture nella città. Spoleto 1962‘, is considered a milestone in the history of 20th century art. Conceived of and curated by Giovanni Carandente for the Festival dei Due Mondi in 1962, it represented one of the first examples of dialogue and interaction between industry and contemporary art. On that occasion, many of the greatest artists of the time, such as David Smith, Alexander Calder, Beverly Pepper, Lucio Fontana, Nino Franchina and Ettore Colla created metal works in the various Italian workshops of the company Italsider. Their works were exhibited outdoors in the historic centre of Spoleto and some of them are now part of the collection of the Spoleto Gallery of Modern Art.
Bearing these projects in mind and updating them for the current economic and artistic context, the ‘We Love Art. Vision and Creativity Made in Italy’ created the conditions in which each artist was able to realize his own creation in close synergy with one of the 8 companies involved in the project: through factory visits and inspections in the factory, a productive relationship between the artists and the companies. The interaction with the companies, the value that each artist took from experience, the inspirational motives for the work generated by the artists’ encounter with the world of the factory and the unique, individual understanding of the art-business relationship of each artist, were all recounted in an moving way in the video accompanying the exhibition, produced by PRC Srl.
The exhibition includes works by Benni Bosetto, Giulia Cenci, Tomaso De Luca, Lulù Nuti, Amedeo Polazzo, Alice Ronchi, Giulio Saverio Rossi and Namsal Siedlecki.
