MILAN.- From 17 to 19 September 2021 (VIP preview 16 September) miart, the international modern and contemporary art fair organised by Fiera Milano, will make a long-awaited comeback. Now in its twenty-fifth edition, it will be directed for the first time by Nicola Ricciardi.

145 galleries from 21 countries (traditionally split into 5 sections: Established Contemporary, Established Masters, Emergent, Decades, and Generations) will present in the pavilions of fieramilanocity_MiCo - and at the same time on a dedicated digital platform - artworks by established contemporary artists, modern masters, and emerging young talents. With a path full of dialogues, discoveries, and rediscoveries from the early twentieth century to the creations of the latest generations, miart maintains its wide chronological offer and confirms its international nature.

Moreover, this year, miart pays special attention to the poetic word - interpreted as a form of universal language - starting with the title chosen for its 2021 edition: Dismantling the silence, from the namesake collection of poems by the Serbian-born American poet Charles Simić, fifty years after its publication. This theme has been explored through a series of initiatives designed to trigger new dialogues between past and present, history and experimentation, and promoting the blossoming of new forms of communication among all the subjects that have always animated the fair.

The first of these initiatives is the editorial project And Flowers / Words that, over the past three months, has involved in weekly online conversations numerous personalities from the Italian artistic and cultural world who share a special interest in the written and spoken word: from Massimiliano Gioni to Mariangela Gualtieri, from Luca Lo Pinto to Emanuele Trevi (now available at https://www.miart.it/-andflowers-words.html)

In continuity with this idea, miart now presents Starry Worlds, a new program inspired by a poem quoted during one of the online conversations - For Memory (1981), by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) – and, in particular, by the verses:




freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

Driven by a similar desire of "putting together, inch by inch, the starry worlds", miart connected various city’s institutions by asking the artists involved in their September exhibitions to share verses, quotes and fragments of poetry that have been significant or influential for their research and work. These pieces will then be collected to form a very peculiar anthology that will also be a poetic map to the city of Milan.

Many of the city’s main cultural sites have already been invited to participate in Starry Worlds, including: Chiostri di Sant'Eustorgio with Alessandro Pessoli, Fondazione Furla and GAM - Galleria d'Arte Moderna with Nairy Baghramian, Fondazione ICA with Simone Fattal and Michael Anastassiades, Fondazione Pini with Elisabetta Benassi, Fondazione Pirelli HangarBicocca with Neïl Beloufa and Maurizio Cattelan, Fondazione Pomodoro with Nevine Mahmoud, Margherita Raso and Derek MF Di Fabio, Fondazione Prada with Simon Fujiwara, PAC - Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea with Luisa Lambri and Zehra Doğan, and Triennale Milano with Corrado Levi and Elena Rivoltini. Other civic institutions and city festivals will be added in the coming weeks.

Starry Worlds anticipates and enhances the Milano Art Week, a rich calendar of exhibition openings and special projects promoted in collaboration with Assessorato alla Cultura del Comune di Milano which traditionally and consistently brings together the city's major public institutions and private foundations.

The collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo, supporting miart as its main partner, is also renewed: international flair, excellence, and attention to the cultural development of the area are the values that link miart to the Bank, and through this synergy they contribute to reinforce the central role of Milan on the national and international scene, offering a further driving force for growth and economic, cultural, and civil development.

Also confirmed for this edition is the Fondazione Fiera Milano Acquisition Fund which is worth 50,000 Euros and aims at expanding the collection of Fondazione Fiera Milano, that currently consists of 99 works representing different artistic languages and it is today housed in the Palazzina degli Orafi, the headquarters of the Foundation.

All the other main prizes were also confirmed: the Herno Prize, born from the collaboration between miart and Herno and now in its sixth edition, will award a prize of 10,000 Euros to the booth with the best exhibition project; the LCA Prize for Emergent — worth 4.000 Euros and established in 2015 as part of the collaboration between miart and LCA Studio Legale — will go to the gallery with the best presentation within the Emergent section; the Rotary Club Milano Brera Prize for Contemporary Art and Young Artists, now in its thirteenth edition and established in 2009 as the first award within miart, will purchase an artwork by an emerging or mid-career artist to be donated to the Museo del Novecento in Milan.