Bologna Modernissima
The exhibition told the story of an artist’s relationship with the city through its signs and stories in an original journey to rediscover its identity.
JUNE 28-JULY 15, 2023
GALLERIA CAVOUR 1959
Flavio Favelli exhibited in Galleria Cavour 1959 a selection of works specially chosen for a special place that the people of Bologna have always considered their living room.
The rationalist “passage” that unites four of the city’s squares thus becomes the centerpiece of an experiment in contemporary art that sees Favelli’s exhibition integrated within a project that aims to promote artists from the area and soon to be young emerging Italian talents.
For Favelli, the works “Insegna Bolognese,” “Insegna Bologna Centro,” “Derby” the poster showcase with the Bologna-Fiorentina soccer teams, the “Bologna Juve” collage, the “Arte Fiera 77” poster up to a panel painted red blue become works to make a place speak, and also light spies to tell a personal relationship with the city that is nourished by distance and proximity.
All relationships that have to do with identity and a territory will always have boundaries and reflect conflict. Being born in Florence and having always lived in Bologna, from the age of 6, I experienced the great conflict that generated identity and cultural belonging between the two cities. I experienced it at home, as the strong contrast in my family was exacerbated precisely by the different blood of my parents. So you find yourself between two fires, between two worlds that you can look at from the outside in a detached way, without pathos, the splendors along with the miseries. Bologna Modernissima is thus an exhibition about Bologna, about documents, objects, elaborates, then works. Of objective correlatives that discuss signs and histories of the city, of its identity, which art manages to observe sufficiently”.
Flavio Favelli
A place, Galleria Cavour 1959, where to rediscover the traces of a contemporaneity that is also reflected in the innovations that this space-which has become carbon neutral thanks to its focus on sustainability-continues to communicate to its visitors.
Galleria Cavour 1959 has always been synonymous with fashion, art and culture. It was home to one of Bologna’s most famous galleries, Galleria de’ Foscherari, which exhibited Arte Povera works in the 1960s, with the exhibition curated by Germano Celant in 1968, where Michelangelo Pistoletto’s first works were displayed. And it was precisely master Pistoletto, following the exhibition held at Palazzo Boncompagni in 2021, who decided to leave his most symbolic work, the Third Paradise, in Bologna so that it could be displayed in the Gallery’s Trivio”.
Paola Pizzighini Benelli, presidente della Fondazione Palazzo Boncompagni e Galleria Cavour
