We The Italians | Italian art: The Pecci Center

Italian art: The Pecci Center

Italian art: The Pecci Center

  • WTI Magazine #88 Feb 20, 2017
  • 1697

Prato is a small town in the heart of Tuscany, known by all for its textile production. Its proximity to Florence and its renowned beauties always penalized the rise of a tourist traffic. But at the end of the eighties of last century a virtuous circle made by many collectors, the municipality's desire to emerge and a great insight in focusing on multimedia, led Prato to the forefront of the contemporary Italian scene with the opening of the Center for contemporary art Luigi Pecci.

The original structure of the Pecci Center was inaugurated in 1988 on the multi-functional model of the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, included the exhibition space of the museum. From the beginning, it was dedicated to geographical or thematic scenic displays, investigations on different contemporary media languages (painting, sculpture, installation, architecture, design, fashion, photography, video, film, publishing, graphics), as well as to proposals for individual protagonists of the national and international art scene.

The museum activities has been brought on for over twenty five years and has been subsequently increased to a permanent collection that represents the permanent trace of what was proposed at the Pecci Center for temporary exhibitions. Mostly focusing on Italian and international artistic developments, the activities started from the topics of the eighties and early nineties of the twentieth century to arrive over the next years to understand, backwards, artistic researches of the second half of the twentieth century.

In 2006 the Pecci family, who in the meantime had changed the nature of the institution by association to foundation, chose the architect Maurice Nio to expand the facility and project it permanently in the twenty-first century. After ten years of work, the result is the amazing chrome structure similar to a golden spaceship landed on the outskirts of Prato, connecting with the existing structure designed by Italo Gamberini.

The inauguration of the new headquarters is entrusted to the temporary exhibition “E’ arrivata la fine del mondo” ("The end of the world has come"), which, in a broad unwinding of global contemporary art proposals, gives the opportunity to appreciate very closely the development of the new center. The hope is the creation of a Bilbao effect in Prato, where the museum itself sometimes becomes more beautiful and interesting than its content; or more simply, without making comparisons, it is already itself an attraction for tourists.

On the occasion of the reopening, a number of other related exhibitions bring the visitor in different parts of the city, a winning strategy to discover the different souls of Prato, last but not least the very strong presence of the Chinese community that is gradually changing the social order and even the urban city. In a region like Tuscany, which has very few contemporary architecture and large-scale public commission, this new Pecci Center could be an example to be considered for the other careful and increasingly competitive Tuscan cities.