Piazza Cavour 1 – San Giovanni Valdarno

The Museo delle Terre Nuove houses the work of Valerio Berruti, a well-known artist hailing from the province of Cuneo who has become a global name. His work reflects on how man and nature are trapped in a system with no way out. His vision of childhood, understood as a meta-temporal concept, is an invitation to overcome the ideas and opposition that we build around us; his children – whether drawn, painted or sculpted – suggest new perspectives and new approaches. As hymns to poetry, wonder and play, his works are powerful tools for living.

Valerio Berruti was born in Alba in 1977. After finishing his high-school education, he bought a small, seventeenth-century deconsecrated church in Verduno to use as his studio. A graduate of DAMS in Turin, he is known for his distinctive style which combines drawing and painting to explore psychological and social themes in evocative pieces. Since his earliest solo and group exhibitions, Berruti, he has presented essential and absolute images that scrupulously and intensively explore emotion, everyday life, memory and family ties. He participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) with La figlia di Isacco, a video-animation of 600 drawings with music by Paolo Conte. In the same year, his piece I can fly served as the cover art for Lucio Dalla’s album Angoli nel cielo.

Piazza Masaccio 8 – San Giovanni Valdarno

The Museo della Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie displays the work of international artist Leandro Erlich. In his Collection de Nuages, the artist presents clouds in imposing glass cases, evoking curiosities in display cabinets. While familiar, the fragile form of the cloud defies the laws of physics, inviting viewers to reflect on the intangible and the ephemeral. The Annunciation by Fra Angelico has a fascinating connection with Erlich’s work in this regard. Despite working in different eras and contexts, both artists share an interest in the spiritual element and the ideal image, inviting the viewer to explore dimensions beyond the fleeting present, through works that seem suspended between the concrete and the abstract, the immanent and the transcendent.

Born in Argentina in 1973, Erlich lives and works in Paris, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. He began his professional career at the age of eighteen with a solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires and, after receiving several scholarships (El Fondo Nacional de las Artes, and Fundacion Antorchas), continued his studies at the Core Program, an artist residency in Houston (Glassell School of Art, 1998), where he developed his famous pieces Swimming Pool and Living Room. In 2000, he participated in the Whitney Biennale with Rain, and in 2001 represented Argentina at the 49th Venice Biennale with Swimming Pool, an emblematic piece now in the permanent collections of the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa (Japan) and the Voorlinden Museum (Netherlands).

Corso Italia 83 – San Giovanni Valdarno

Casa Masaccio | Centro per l’arte contemporanea presents the work of Sofia Uslenghi and Gabriele Basilico. Uslenghi’s photographs explore the artist’s deep connection with her origins, a tie that generates tension between the pull of the past and the desire to break free from it. Exhibiting the images in recreated domestic environments and living rooms sets them within contexts that evoke intimacy and familiarity, inviting viewers to reflect on complex dynamics related to identity, home and belonging, and offering them a space to explore their own roots and lives. Gabriele Basilico, on the other hand, often explored cities and the art of inhabiting places, even taking some of his photographs in Valdarno and the town of San Giovanni (Synoikismos – Vivere insieme nella città diffusa del Valdarno, 1997). The two artists are connected by a shared interest in exploring identity, memory, space and boundaries within the infinite relationships between the urban context and personal stories.

Sofia Uslenghi was born in 1985 in Reggio Calabria. Half of her family hails from Gerace and half from Messina. After spending her childhood by the Strait of Messina and her teenage years in Brescia, she went to university in Parma and now lives in Milan. She took up photography at the age of twenty and it became her tool for exploring her personal history. She focuses on self-portraits, overlapping images to stratify and amalgamate different aspects of her history, places of origin and the people involved. Her work incorporates maps, satellite photographs, street views and aerial views, elements that allow her to virtually return to her ‘domestic geography’, where she was born and where she feels she has left something of herself. The work continues every time she decides to move home and city, when she uses photography as a dynamic repository of places, memories and images.

Gabriele Basilico (1944–2013) was one of the most important Italian photographers and is considered one of the masters of contemporary Italian and European photography. While his career focused initially on social themes, from the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, the influence of his architectural studies became increasingly evident in his photography. Within his vast oeuvre reflecting on the transformation of urban areas, he focused on the transition from the industrial age to the post-industrial age. The theme of the city – understood as a complex and refined product of economics and history – occupies a central place. For Basilico, photographing urban spaces is not simply an exercise in aesthetics or in the harmonious interpretation of forms. His images crystallise the work of man and the social and economic transformations in the area.

Via Trieste 1 – Montevarchi

Il Cassero per la scultura italiana dell’Ottocento e del Novecento is exhibiting the works of Daniele Costa and Gianni Lucchesi, offering an important opportunity to learn about their artistic vision. Costa’s video X tells the story of a young man imprisoned in the tiny Veneto municipality of Lago and allows the audience to completely immerse themselves in his narrative. Similarly, Lucchesi invites reflection on a body that is also enclosed in a sort of open-air museum. His work tends to highlight the fragility of human existence and the way in which experiences and emotions intertwine with material elements. His sculptures evoke a sense of vulnerability, suggesting that every form, every creation carries with it the scars of time and history. Within the museum, an intense dialogue unfurls between the two artists, sparking reflection on their ways of feeling part of microcosms that become universal mirrors.

Daniele Costa was born in Castelfranco Veneto in 1992. He began working as an artist in 2014, focusing mainly on video. After graduating in Music and Performing Arts from the University of Padua, he completed his studies in Visual Arts in 2017 at Iuav University of Venice. His work focuses on knowledge of the human body, in two directions of personal introspection: on the one hand, internal function, based on medical-scientific insights, and on the other, human uniqueness, the relationship of the individual with history and with the world. His projects have been presented within various exhibition contexts such as the MAXXI in Rome, the Fondazione Spinola Banna and the GAM in Turin, the National Gallery of Art in Tirana (Albania), the House of King Petar I Karađorđevi in Belgrade (Serbia), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki (Greece), ArteVisione Careof and Sky Arte (Milan), and the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa (Venice).

Gianni Lucchesi was born in Pisa in 1965. He began making art in 1985 and participated in numerous exhibitions and events of national and international importance, such as the Berlin Art Fair and the Casablanca Biennale in Morocco. He won contemporary art competitions and worked on public commissions. In 2018 and 2019 he worked for the Teatro del Silenzio in Lajatico, collaborating with the artistic director Alberto Bartalini and the curator Carlo Alberto Arzela. His work has always been motivated by the desire to visually translate the reflections that arise from his exploration of the psyche and emotional states of the individual. His works explore the relationship between the individual and their inner world, as well as their relationship with others and their environment. Through visual metaphors that draw on universal languages, the fruit of artistic and spiritual research, Lucchesi manages to give shape, depth and colour to emotions.

Via Poggio Bracciolini 36 – Montevarchi

The Museo Paleontologico houses a piece by Vedovamazzei entitled New Egg. While the museum preserves what was, New Egg focuses on the idea of the future: chicken coops, understood both as cages and houses, evoke tradition and the past, a time when rural life was at the heart of our existence. On the contrary, eggs are a potent symbol of future possibility, as promises of new life and change. New Egg therefore symbolises the relationship between memory and innovation, inviting the public to reflect on their experiences and expectations of something to come, to be safeguarded precisely because it is unknown and full of hope. Together, the museum, a place of historical and scientific knowledge, and the work of art, a symbol of change, invite complex reflection on our relationship with time and with life itself.

Simeone Crispino and Stella Scala, better known as Vedovamazzei, live and work in Milan. Complex, extremely prolific artists are impossible to define with a single broad theme, formal tendency or working method. Their body of over 900 works is the fruit of continuous study, research and engagement, and the support of extraordinary commissions. Their artworks, from drawings on paper to monumental installations that have travelled the world, are powerful enough to leave an indelible impression in the minds of those who engage with them. Avoiding purity of form and content without focusing solely on the intellect, the grim sneer of inspiration, Vedovamazzei see irony in a carnal way, showcasing their own bodily reflexes, and all the excesses that distinguish them, while addressing universal themes with originality and incisiveness.

Piazza Matteotti 5 – Loro Ciuffenna

Partly to mark the artist Venturino’s years of ‘imprisonment’ at the San Salvi psychiatric hospital, Casa Venturino Venturi presents Oliviero Toscani’s Ritratti di condannati a morte negli Stati Uniti d’America and Alberto Agosti’s A Stenti. The motif of the cage returns, used here to explore the risks of isolation and deprivation. The faces of the prisoners portrayed by Toscani represent individuals whose lives have been constrained, raising questions about justice and human rights. Meanwhile, Agosti’s reflects on the way in which everyday life can become a structure of limitation and vulnerability. His piece evokes the feeling of being trapped, even by one’s own everyday reality. Together, the works offer a powerful meditation on the theme of confinement and the very boundaries of human experience, stimulating critical reflection on individual and social life and on freedom.

Oliviero Toscani, son of Fedele, the first photojournalist of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, was born in Milan in 1942 and studied photography and graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. He was internationally known as the creative force behind renowned international newspapers and brands, and the famous creator of corporate images and advertising campaigns. In 1993 he conceived and managed Fabrica, an international centre for the arts and modern communication research. After more than three decades of editorial innovation, advertising, film and television, he has turned his attention to creative communication applied to various media, working from his new research centre, La Sterpaia, Bottega dell’Arte della Comunicazione. His latest projects include collaborations with the Ministry of Health, Regione Calabria and the Umberto Veronesi Foundation, and various social-engagement campaigns on road safety, anorexia, violence against women, and free-roaming dogs.

Alberto Agosti was born in Piacenza in 1997 and currently lives in Milan. After graduating from classical high school, he attended Central Saint Martins university in London. In 2019 he moved to Paris to assist the Art Director of Christian Louboutin, returning to London the following year to collaborate with the stylist Ibrahim Kamara. In 2021 he graduated in Fashion Communication and Promotion and presented his degree project on the digital platform Show Studio in London. Agosti currently works at Gucci in the Art Direction team.

Cavriglia

Museo MINE is currently renovating its exhibition spaces, and has therefore chosen a special angle for the project: a series of previously unreleased posters of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Terzo Paradiso are on display throughout the town centre.

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began to exhibit in 1955, and in 1960 held his first solo show at the Galatea Gallery in Turin. His first paintings focused on self-portrait. Pistoletto quickly achieved international recognition and success, which led to various solo exhibitions throughout the 1960s in prestigious galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. In 1975 and 1976 he held twelve exhibitions in Turin, and created his ‘dark’-volumes series from 1985 to 1989. In 2004 the University of Turin awarded him an honorary degree, and in 2007 he received the Wolf Foundation Prize of Art in Jerusalem for his career, ceaselessly creative and prolific as well as intensely engaged on an educational and social level. In the same period, he created the symbol and poetics behind of the Third Paradise project, which would spread all over the world in the subsequent years. Pistoletto’s artworks are characterised by endless experimentation and the integration of the viewer and of life into the reality of the work.