As in Dante’s journey towards redemption, until 18 June 2023 Palazzo Strozzi and the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation unite to celebrate the stars of contemporary art with the exhibition “Reaching for the Stars. From Maurizio Cattelan to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.” Over seventy works by the most important Italian and international artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, one of the most prestigious collections of contemporary art in Italy.
Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director of Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition moves towards a critique of today’s society, linking more than fifty authors of different nationalities, so as to explore the main artistic research through a constellation of works exhibited in all spaces of the Palace, in a continuous game between ancient and modern. “Reaching for the Stars” offers a journey from the Piano Nobile to the Strozzina, up to the Renaissance courtyard. Here is presented “GONOGO”, a recent installation by Goshka Macuga: a monumental space rocket that invites you to a journey with multiple meanings. In parallel there are sections that address issues proposed with different sensitivities and media, such as alienation and fragility or racial and gender discrimination.
Hirst con “Love is Great”
From the first room, dedicated to the London artists Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, one perceives the reflective and profound common thread of the exhibition. Hirst with “Love is Great” creates a microcosm full of existential questions about life and death, through a turquoise canvas full of butterflies: the blue background evokes the sky, a symbol for the ancient Egyptians of the otherworldly world. Sarah Lucas with “Love me” instead is a clear cry of gender objectification with the lower part of a female body with legs wide open, head missing and with mouths and eyes painted on it, in a Freudian interpretation linked to the interchangeability between mouth, eyes and sexual orifices.
Rosemary Trockel
In the second room, the frottage by Isa Genzken and the knitted paintings by Rosemarie Trockel are interesting: the artist uses a computerized machine and elevates knitting to an artistic activity, considered only a female pastime, challenging the dominant male chauvinism in the art world. But it is from the third room, linked to Made in Italy with various works by Maurizio Cattelan, that the exhibition takes on an even more serious, almost grotesque tone. From a mannequin representing a hanged man – created in the artist’s likeness – in “The revolution is us” to the rubble collected by Cattelan in the 1993 attack on the PAC by Cosa Nostra: the tender feelings evoked by the title “Lullaby” they ironically contrast with the climate of tension and the mournful event.
Not even the famous phrase of Cinderella is saved, in a total disenchantment, with the sarcastic work “Bidibidobidiboo”: the theme of death returns in fact in the installation where a humanized squirrel took his own life with a pistol shot, without the help of the magic potion. The fourth room is dedicated to identities of gender, race, sexual orientation or cultural affiliation.