It opened on Wednesday 16 May, in the presence of the president emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo Giovanni Bazoli, the exhibition “Art as revelation. From the Luigi and Peppino Agrati collection”, which will be hosted until 19 August at the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan, in Piazza della Scala. In the heart of the Lombard capital, in front of two other symbols of the city Palazzo Marino and the Teatro alla Scala, stands the museum managed by the Intesa Sanpaolo bank, which makes its increasingly extensive artistic heritage available to the citizens. Before this, among others, it was the turn of an exhibition on Hayez and another on painters from the period of Caravaggio.
In the coming weeks and months, however, the Luigi and Peppino Agrati collection will be exhibited, which consists of 500 Italian and international works of contemporary art (the selection is from the second half of the twentieth century). Of these, 74 are exhibited in the Galleries: Luigi and Peppino Agrati were two important Lombard industrialists, representatives of the enlightened Milanese bourgeoisie, who began collecting them in the XNUMXs and then decided, after Peppino's death, to donate the entire assets to Intesa Sanpaolo. The exhibition is curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, with the general coordination of Gianfranco Brunelli. Among the most important works are those of international artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Rauschenberg and Christo, and also of protagonists of the Italian scene such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Mario Schifano, Alberto Burri, Fausto Melotti.
“The Luigi and Peppino Agrati collection – commented Giovanni Bazoli -, one of the most important art collections of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy, will become part of the Intesa Sanpaolo collections thanks to the extraordinarily generous gesture of the Cavaliere del Lavoro Luigi Agrati . A significant selection of works from this collection is presented to the public for the first time in the Gallerie di Piazza Scala in Milan. It will be an exceptional opportunity to admire and compare unpublished masterpieces of XNUMXth century Italian, European and American art. The exhibition also aims to be a memory and a tribute to Luigi Agrati who, together with his brother Peppino, gave life to a collection that stands out worldwide in the context of private art collections.”
“Art as a revelation – he added instead the curator Luca Massimo Barbero – means presenting to the public for the first time a representative selection of works from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati collection as a visual gift to the city, revealing the sensitivity and love for art of the two collectors. When in November 1970, now known as one of the epochal moments of contemporary art in Milan, Christo removed the white sheet with which he had wrapped the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Piazza del Duomo to cover the Monument to Leonardo in Piazza della Scala, the Agrati lived the great event live. Peppino, immediately coming into contact with the artist, commissioned him some works for the garden of his villa in Brianza and was among the patrons of Valley Curtain, one of the environmental interventions that made Christo known as a pioneer of Land Art. directly on the most important developments of their contemporary art, significantly exemplified by the personal relationship with Christo, is also reflected in the intense dialogue with Fausto Melotti and in the careful and profound understanding of trends such as conceptual art and minimalism, of which the large neon by Flavin, dedicated precisely to Peppino Agrati, is the emblem. The collected works speak to us today of a way of conceiving the collection as a revelation and enrichment, as a sharing of a possible world of images that embody contemporary living".
