Musei di Genova Contemporary Art Museum of Villa Croce

 

 

 

Contemporary Art Museum of Villa Croce

In the beautiful setting of this 19th-century villa, surrounded by a large park in the residential district of Carignano and overlooking the sea, sits Contemporary Art Museum Villa Croce. When it was inaugurated on February 2, 1985, it was the second most important museum of its kind in Italy and it immediately became a reference point for contemporary art in Genoa.

The museum's collections consist of over 4,000 works - paintings, drawings, sculptures - which document modern and contemporary art from the 1930s onwards. Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Bruno Munari, Osvaldo Licini, Ben Vautier are just some of the leading figures present in the collection. The collection is largely held in storage and displayed periodically as part of the Museum’s exhibition programmes.

The collections are constantly evolving thanks to numerous donations and acquisitions.

The museum presents an important annual program of exhibitions and events that keep the museum alive and in touch with the contemporary, national and international art world, offering food for thought and comparisons with some of the protagonists of art in Liguria.

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The museum's rich collection consists of over 4,000 works.

The original core of the collection comes from the collection of Maria Cernuschi, with 200 works that testify to the Italian abstract movement and includes protagonists such as Osvaldo Licini, the experiments of Lucio Fontana and Bruno Munari, the optical-perceptive and preconceptual research, documented with an important "Achrome" by Piero Manzoni and the experimentation of artists such as Paolo Icaro. The same trends can also be found elsewhere in the collection such as the LAB (Laboratorio della Bassa Lunigiana) donated in 2001, with extraordinary works such as the large sculpture "Nature wounded" by Gunther Uecker.

Since the end of the 1980s, this patrimony has been enriched thanks to gallery owners and artists who have been protagonists of the most important Ligurian artistic efforts from the second post-war period to today. The most recent acquisitions mainly concerned contemporary works coming from dedicated projects created specifically for the museum spaces such as the wall drawing by Ben Vautier or the interventions by Flavio Favelli and Plamen Dejanoff in the room with a fireplace on the ground floor, which demonstrates the close relationship between museum and artists, an aspect which is central to the activity carried out at Villa Croce.

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