ROME.- The next edition of the Art Quadriennale, titled FUORI, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol and organised by Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, will be open to the public from 29 October 2020 to 17 January 2021 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. The Art Quadrienniale is the main exhibition dedicated to contemporary Italian art. It takes place every four years and is a highly anticipated event for art professionals and the public. For this reason, it also receives major support from the Italian government.

THE EXHIBITION
The 2020 Art Quadriennale, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, will propose a new image of Italian contemporary art at an international level; the title, FUORI (meaning “out”) is emblematic of the perspective proposed by the curators.

FUORI is an invitation to think outside the box, to take an eccentric—off-centre—stance, to adopt an oblique look based on a mutual relationship with otherness.

FUORI is a liberation from any constraint or category that harnessed art and individuals. The 2020 Art Quadriennale wants to be OUT of mind, OUT of fashion, OUT of time, OUT of scale, OUT of the game, OUT of place, through the works and research of the artists presented.

FUORI is an exhortation to overcome the boundaries between visual arts and other disciplines to produce a multigenerational and multidisciplinary landscape of voices that alternate, intertwine, touch each other and (not necessarily) influence each other.

FUORI is an appeal to get out of the self-referential enclosure in which contemporary art and its institutions often lock themselves up and open up to different audiences and cultural production areas.

FUORI is a spectacular journey through parallel realities, obsessions, cosmic visions, erotic drives, infinite and indefinite forms of desire.

FUORI is a recognition of female and feminist approaches, research in the queer field and gender fluid imagery in the history of contemporary art, with an explicit homage to the experience of FUORI!, the first Italian association for homosexual rights, established in the early 1970s.




FUORI is the primary need to get out of the physical and mental restrictions we have all experienced in this complex year of 2020.

For the 2020 Art Quadriennale, the curators have selected 43 artists, presented through monographic rooms and new works, with the aim of outlining an alternative way of reading Italian art from the 1960s to the present day.

“We decided to connect the imaginaries of younger and mid-career artists with the experimentations of pioneers who have not always found a place in the canonical narration of Italian art”—says Sarah Cosulich—“These are artists who confront and have confronted themselves with different disciplinary fields such as dance, music, theatre, cinema, fashion, architecture and design, creating sometimes discontinuous paths that enhance the understanding of Italian artistic past and strengthen the one produced in the present”.

In the words of Stefano Collicelli Cagol: “In order to develop a visionary exhibition, we drew inspiration from a number of lines of research: the expression of desires and obsessions; the exploration of the unspeakable and the immeasurable; the investigation of the tensions between art and power, represented by the metaphor of the Palace”.

The selected artists are: Alessandro Agudio, Micol Assaël, Irma Blank, Monica Bonvicini, Benni Bosetto, Sylvano Bussotti, Chiara Camoni, Lisetta Carmi, Guglielmo Castelli, Giuseppe Chiari, Isabella Costabile, Giulia Crispiani, Cuoghi Corsello, DAAR - Alessandro Petti - Sandi Hilal, Tomaso De Luca, Caterina De Nicola, Bruna Esposito, Simone Forti, Anna Franceschini, Giuseppe Gabellone, Francesco Gennari, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Diego Gualandris, Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano, Norma Jeane, Luisa Lambri, Lorenza Longhi, Diego Marcon, Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Valerio Nicolai, Alessandro Pessoli, Amedeo Polazzo, Cloti Ricciardi, Michele Rizzo, Cinzia Ruggeri, Salvo, Lydia Silvestri, Romeo Castellucci - Socìetas, Davide Stucchi, TOMBOYS DON’T CRY, Maurizio Vetrugno, Nanda Vigo, Zapruder.

A NEW METHOD
The 2020 Art Quadriennale is the result of three years of work characterised by research, encounters, visits to exhibitions, analysis of artists’ portfolios and studio visits. The preparation of this edition began in 2018-2019 with the planning of initiatives in Italy and abroad aimed at spreading knowledge of and garnering support for Italian art.

In this context, the Q-Rated itinerant workshops for young artists and curators and the Q-International fund for the strengthening of the presence of Italian art in institutions abroad have constituted a fundamental resource for research, fulfilling the institution’s mission to map the artistic scene in Italy.

The preparation of the exhibition was accompanied by archival research, with the Quadriennale Historical Archive as the main source: the Quadriennale institution has an extraordinary collection of documents and publications on the history of Italian art from the 20th century to the present day. Thanks to an original project, 20th-century Italian art and the works on display will be intertwined in a fascinating story that will combine past and present. The programme of the exhibition includes a series of performance events in which Luca Scarlini—art historian, writer, storyteller—will present little-known facts and protagonists of Italian 20th-century art and relate them to the themes that permeate the works on display.

The exhibition will occupy the entire Palazzo delle Esposizioni for a total area of 4,000 square metres. The exhibition display, designed by Italian architect Alessandro Bava, aims at providing a new path for the visitors through Palazzo delle Esposizioni, an important building for its exhibition history. At the same time, the display gives to the public the possibility to establish relationships among works, themes and approaches.