Migrazione Exhibit (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy)

 

"Migrazione" Exhibit

One of the two temporary exhibits (the other was “From Kandinsky to Pollock: The Art of the Guggenheim Collections, March 19-July 24, 2016) we encountered during our tour of the Palazzo Strozzi was the “Migrazione (Migrations),” a major one-man show at the Strozzina area devoted to the work of Liu Xiaodong, one of China’s most important and original contemporary artists. Opened last April 22, 2016, the exhibit will run until June 19, 2016. 

Check out “Palazzo Strozzi” and “FromKandinsky to Pollock: The Art of the Guggenheim Collections Exhibit”

Devised and produced by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, this major exhibition showcased a broad selection of paintings, drawings and photographs created by the artist specifically following a period of residence in Tuscany between autumn 2015 and spring 2016. The main themes of the work on display, with a special focus on the local Chinese communities, are the cities of Florence and Prato and the Sienese countryside which Liu Xiaodong observed and experienced through direct contact with the local people.

 

Born in 1963 in Liaoning province but trained in Beijing, the artist is celebrated for his very personal painterly style poised between painting of history and a reporter’s angle of the contemporary world. In Liu’s large canvases, Seemingly routine moments or daily events take on an epic monumentality, akin to stills recording places in the world marked by conflict or by social and human tension. 

While summary and extremely controlled, the style is, at the same time, emotional and heavy with texture.  His reproduction of images of everyday life (almost always done in the open air) is inhabited by men and women who populate the countryside or the cities in which the painter has chosen to spend time. Photography, used as a tool of observation and a model for his painting, plays a crucial role in his creative process. Alongside his paintings and preparatory sketches, it is, in its own right, also an objet d’art for display, testifying to his urgency to forge a link between different artistic techniques and cultural realities.

 

"Refugees 4" (2015) depicts Syrian refugees at the port of
Lesbos gathered together in a moment of rest

The artist’s special interest in the Chinese community in Prato, the largest such community in Italy and one of the most important in Europe (now in its third generation), as well as other sites around Florence which host large Chinese communities (San Donnino, Osmannoro, etc.), sparked the original idea behind Palazzo Strozzi’s project. 

The artist also took inspiration from and addressed and the classic Tuscan countryside, the hills of the Florentine and Sienese Chianti districts, deciding to produce a number of paintings depicting the “dreamlike” and “picture postcard” landscape of the Vald’Orcia and the Crete Senesi. 

The exhibition also provided an opportunity for a reflection on the migration of peoples and the ways in which they interact with their new physical, geographical and cultural environments, including in connection with recent critical events on Europe’s borders – events which Liu has witnessed, in the first person, in Bodrum in Turkey, and in Kos in Greece. 

Completing the project is the publication of a catalogue devoted to the artist and by a broad programme of activities designed to tie in with the exhibition including conferences, workshops and lectures exploring the exhibition’s themes in greater depth in Florence and other venues in Tuscany.  Alongside with pictures of paintings from the exhibition, this catalogue also includes a travel diary, handwritten by Liu in Chinese (with translation in English and Italian) plus drawings and photographs taken by the artist from the trip to Prato in September, 2015, with focus on the local Chinese communities.  Writings by the curator Arturo Galansino, Francesco Bonami and Giorgio Bernardini, and short introduction of the artist are also included.

 

"Migrazione" Exhibit: Palazzo Strozzi, Piazza degli Strozzi, 50123 Florence, Italy. Tel: +39 055 264 5155. Open daily, 10 AM – 8 PM (Thursdays, 11 PM). E-mail: info@palazzostrozzi.org. Website: www.palazzostrozzi.org. Admission: € 5,00 (full), € 4.00 (reduced conventions and youth up to 26 years) and € 3.00 (schools). Free admission on Thursday, 6 PM to 11PM.