From 23rd September 2016 to 22nd January 2017, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence hosts Italy’s first major retrospective dedicated to Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s most celebrated and influential contemporary artists, curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.
A dissident Chinese artist, fighting for freedom of expression, Ai Weiwei is known world-wide as much for his challenging contemporary art practice as for his political activism.
Ai Weiwei invades with his extraordinary creative freedom every space of Palazzo Strozzi: the façade, the courtyard, the Piano Nobile and the Strozzina with iconic monumental installations, sculptures and objects which are symbols of his career, and also video works and photographic series with a strong effect.
For the first time, Palazzo Strozzi is used as a unitary exhibition space, thus creating an experience which is completely original for its visitors and allowing the Chinese artist to measure himself with a contest rich in historical solicitations and architectural sparks. A new and large installation by the artist interests two façades of the Renaissance building with twenty-two orange rescue rafts made of rubber anchored to the windows of Palazzo Strozzi: a project that draws the attention to the fate of the refugees risking their life every day to reach Europe through the Mediterranean Sea.
The centre of the courtyard is dominated by Refraction instead, a giant metallic wing made of solar panels that is motionless due to its dimensions and weight of over five tonnes. It is an evocative metaphor for the constriction and negation of freedom.
Visitors to the Palazzo will be greeted by Reframe, an architectural intervention covering the 2 main façades of the building with 22 bright orange lifeboats. A project that draws the attention to the lives of the refugees who daily risk their lives to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
“ Hosting a retrospective of this nature in Florence means viewing the city as a modern cultural capital, not simply pegged to the vestiges of its past but able, at long last, to play an active role out in the forefront of artistic developments in our own era.” says Arturo Galansino. “The adjective ‘free’, which gives the title to the exhibition, refers to the freedom regained by Ai Weiwei in 2015, but also to his totally free and creative way in which he has used and interpreted the spaces of Palazzo Strozzi.”
www.palazzostrozzi.org
