AMBIENTI/
ENVIRONMENTS: STORY OF AN EXHIBITION

With Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, Flavio Fergonzi and Paolo Laurini

Fourth event of the Public Program | Lucio Fontana

A conversation Marina Pugliese and Barbara Ferriani, co-curators of the exhibition, and Paolo Laurini, Vice-President of Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Moderated by Flavio Fergonzi, art historian on the faculty of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. They will explore the motivations behind this exhibition and the stages of creating it, from conducting documentary research, to analyzing the sources, to imagining how the works could be reconstructed at Pirelli HangarBicocca.

“Ambienti/Environments”—curated by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vicente Todolí—is made up of pieces that envelop the visitor and demand viewer participation. Many have been replicated for the first time since the artist’s death, specifically for this exhibition. The reconstructions, which demanded considerable research, tangibly convey the incredibly innovative value of this artist’s work within the broader investigation of Environments in the 1950s and ‘60s.
The long process of research and design will be retraced through never-before-seen documents such as the original drawings, the artist’s letters, photos, and articles from the era, in a first-hand account by the two co-curators, moderated by Flavio Fergonzi, one of the most prominent scholars of Italian twentieth-century art and with the participation of the Vice-President of Fondazione Lucio Fontana.
Marina Pugliese focuses on the research process at the root of the show, which examined dozens of documents, many of them never previously studied, in order to present a faithful image of Lucio Fontana’s Environments.
Barbara Ferriani instead describes the painstaking task of investigating the material aspects, which made it possible to accurately convey every significant detail of the individual Environment.
Paolo Laurini talks about the Fondazione Lucio Fontana’s work to protect and promote the artist’s oeuvre, and specifically, his environmental pieces.
The evening concludes with the screening of a behind-the-scenes video which was shot as the show was being mounted, allowing viewers to grasp the complexity of the task.