Prospero | Fashion forward

The Prada Foundation will transform Milan’s contemporary art offering

As a privately-funded museum with ample space, it is able to take more creative risks than the city’s cramped public institutions

By T.A. | MILAN

COMPARED with other major European cities, Milan’s contemporary art offering is slight. The Gallerie d’Arte Moderna, housed in a venerable palazzo, contains some important late-19th-century work, but little of note from the 20th century and nothing from the 21st. The Museo del Novecento, despite its name, is meant to consider contemporary work but has little room to do so; the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea is also constrained by space.

In recent years, the Prada Foundation has expanded to fill this gap. In April it will open an eight-storey tower on the Largo Isarco site, meaning that it will provide more exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art than the other museums combined. Indeed, it will be the largest contemporary art museum in Europe to be supported by private funds.

According to Jonathan Morris, a historian, Milan was always “more a Paris than a Manchester”, with artisans rather than factories producing the goods for the fashion and luxury markets. Spacious palazzos that housed the wealthiest families became the predominant spaces for the display of such artefacts. In the 20th century the city did attempt to address the lack of public galleries: centres for contemporary art were included in two major regeneration schemes, only to be dropped due to a lack of resources. The government of Milan in effect admitted the problem when in 2011 Stefan Boeri, then the city councillor in charge of arts and culture, suggested that the state should help private artistic initiatives in any way that they were able.

Miucca Prada, the granddaughter of Mario Prada, the founder, had turned the luxury fashion house into a profitable international brand through strident design and a refusal to follow the crowd. With Patrizio Bertelli, her husband and business partner, she established the Prada Foundation in 1993 in order to pursue a burgeoning interest in contemporary art. In friendly competition with other bodies such as the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, it hosted exhibitions by artists such as Tobias Rehberger and Thomas Demand, giving them the funds and space to create site-specific pieces or to show particularly large ones.

As such, the Prada Foundation began to address the city’s lack of contemporary art facilities on a site which is itself a statement of intent. Housed in an early-20th-century gin distillery, the building had no real architectural merit. OMA, the architects charged with renovating the site, clad one existing building entirely in gold leaf and another in aluminium foam. The new building looks as if Umberto Boccioni, a Futurist sculptor, had designed a concrete water tower, and adds around 2,000 square metres of gallery space to the existing 11,000 square metres, as well as a restaurant. By alternating rectangular and triangular floor plans the architects have created radically different gallery spaces: as the visitor moves up the storeys the ceilings increase in height, gradually opening out to the sky and the city. The building will house the Prada Foundation’s permanent collection—including artists such as Thomas Demand and Louise Bourgeois—as well as future acquisitions.

In the three years since the Largo Isarco site opened, the Prada Foundation has grown into a cultural institution with a singular energy and breadth of interest. It has been keen to showcase contemporary art and explore unexpected or difficult parts of the artistic patrimony of Italy. Last year they hosted Francesco Vezzoli’s artistic response to the design of Italian television shows in the 1970s, alongside exhibitions by key international contemporary artists. “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918-1943”, its latest exhibition (and largest ever), is similarly brave. It explores Italian art between the wars and how the avant-garde came to collude with Mussolini’s government.

Major public institutions are often reluctant, or unable, to tackle such sensitive topics in depth. It seems that the Prada Foundation sees its role in both civic and creative terms—neatly symbolised by its new tower, dominating the skyline of the often-ignored southern part of Milan.

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