AN IDEA OF BEAUTY
 
Vanessa Beecroft, Chiara Camoni, Andreas Gefeller, Alicja Kwade,
Jean-Luc Mylayne, Isabel Rocamora, Anri Sala and Wilhelm Sasnal
 
29 March−28 July 2013
 
An Idea of Beauty, on view at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS) at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, sets out to explore the work of eight contemporary international artists – Vanessa Beecroft, Chiara Camoni, Andreas Gefeller, Alicja Kwade, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Isabel Rocamora, Anri Sala and Wilhelm Sasnal – and will encourage visitors to reconsider the concept of beauty and to question not only the ‘need’ for it but also its function, value and purpose.
 
Today’s world is heir to an historical and philosophical process that has separated art from beauty, in the sense of a world vision incapable of expressing the complexity and inconsistency of the modern era. At the same time, the term ‘beauty’ in daily use has become more trivialised and debased, and is often used as a synonym for appreciation (like/don’t like) or as the mark of a hedonistic and superficial approach typical of today’s trend towards extreme aestheticisation.
 
In order to rediscover an idea of beauty, we need to adopt a different approach to our sense of reality, to our search for a value, a spiritual moment or to explore an intellectual intuition in greater depth. Thus beauty arises anew from our ability to look at it differently, to grasp and recognise it even in a mundane object, moment or gesture.
 
Visitors to the exhibition will be confronted with works of art soliciting their physical and emotional participation. Through their work the artists seek to highlight the subjectivity with which a person views art, triggering individual responses that can become a tool for forging new connections with other people and with the world at large. On the one hand, they address and revisit such traditional artistic techniques and genres as the themes of landscape and the human figure while, on the other, it is almost as though they are attempting to listen to nature, capturing its moments and its fragments, or reflecting on the power of beauty in its social dimension or in the power to transform that it exercises on each and every one of us.
 
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published in Italian and English by Mandragora.
 
An Idea of Beauty will show concurrently with the exhibition The Springtime of the Renaissance. Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400-1460 at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 23 March to 18 August 2013.
 
With the support of: Comune di Firenze, Provincia di Firenze, Camera di Commercio di Firenze, Associazione Partners Palazzo Strozzi – Regione Toscana – Unicoop Firenze, Ataf.
 
With the patronage of the Polish Institute in Rome
 
Information: Tel. +39 055 2645155, news@strozzina.org

From Maria de’Medici the founder of the Louvre,
to the search of a New Paradigm of Art for the Digital Era.
 
The New Florence Biennale
Ethics DNA of Art
 
The New Florence Biennale’s mission is to stimulate the contemporary reinterpretation of the founding values of Humanism focusing on Ethics as the DNA of Art.
 
The Florence Biennale, founded in 1997 and held at the Fortezza da Basso, is amongst the few international art events which is definitely structured as an independent and self financed platform for contemporary art, where artists from every part of the planet gather in Florence for a intensely unique experience.
 
With this 2013 edition, that celebrates the genesis of a new cycle, the Florence Biennale also inaugurates new vital spaces and is present – for the first time – in some of the most important locations of the Florentine Renaissance.
 
To revitalize these mythic locations through contemporary art, the Florence Biennale has designed a series of collateral events that breathe new life to a tangible synergy of awareness and perception of the arts.
 
The very spirit of the new Florence Biennale is to share the visions and dreams of the digital era generation artists: it is in this context of projective empathy that the Florence Biennale fosters and safeguards the blossoming of young creative minds, offering them a grounding opportunity to develop and establish their artistic careers, in harmony with their proper social cultural biodiversity.
 
It is ascribed to this series of elements; the young artists under 30 constitute the essence and soul of the new Florence Biennale.
 
To face and approach in an innovative way – and with the most elevated ethic-aesthetic-poetic voltage - the enormous undertaking of research and experimentation which imply epistemic and philological, psycho-philosophical and socio-anthropological challenging issues, the Florence Biennale has entrusted Prof. Rolando Bellini the responsibility of the Artistic Direction of the Exhibition and Prof. Francois Zille, the endeavor of senior Strategist & Brand Identity Engineer.