The 2018 has been a record year for Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, where over 180 thousand people including Florentines, tourists and enthusiasts visited the exhibition The Cleaner, by Marina Abramovic, one of the most controversial contemporary female artists. The exposition was opened last September 21st and ended on January 20th and presented beyond 100 works by the artist retracing the history of his art from the 60s to today.
The success of the public for the Florentine venue confirms the Gallery as one of the main destinations in Italy for contemporary art, but also the trend that began three years ago: in 2016 the exhibition “Ai Weiwei. Libero“ had registered 150.000 visitors, and in 2017 the one entitled “Bill Viola. Electronic Renaissance”, was seen by 100.000 people.
“We have moved the contemporary from the basement of the Strozzina to the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Strozzi, a physical shift – commented Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation – which reflects a change of line: to ennoble the contemporary by bringing it to the level of the ancient. We are engaged in an action of "literacy" to the contemporary in Florence and we work on the variety and differentiation of the proposal. The common criterion for all our choices is quality: we offer only the best, the best and we do so starting from our history and identity. Through the most diverse forms of contemporary art we talked about politics, migrations, science, ecology, empathy, etc. To open up, and to do so from a female point of view, the world of performance art, the choice could only fall on Marina Abramović".
Above all, it's the kind of public attracted by the art of Marina Abramovic to have intrigued: 50% are made up of young people under 30, 70% are female, 34% are Florentines, 38% are tourists, while 28% can be described as motivated, having gone to Florence during the day just to visit the exhibition, as reported by Corriere.
Contemporary art is gaining more and more ground among the new exhibitions promoted by museums worldwide. It is not just the great success of Abramovic's exhibition at the Moma in New York entitled "The Artist Is Present" with over half a million visitors, but the comparison with the exhibitions featuring the great names of modern art as protagonists is surprising, such as Pablo Picasso at the Palazzo Reale in Milan with his “Metamorphosis”, the one on Romanticism still in Milan or the one on Andy Warhol at the Ala Brasini of the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome.
