In June 2021 Fondazione Brescia Musei will present Palcoscenici Archeologici, an original site-specific exhibition project that follows the project thread of exhibitions conceived by the Fondazione Brescia Musei, combining its own major historical and archaeological heritage with the most interesting voices of contemporary art.

The initiative is part of the programme of celebrations for the return to the city of Brescia of the Vittoria Alata, the Roman bronze that, after restoration at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, and now placed back in her ancient position in the Capitolium of the Archaeological Park of Roman Brescia, is now spreading her wings wide enough to touch the contemporary world. Palcoscenici Archeologici sees Francesco Vezzoli (Brescia, 1971), one of the Italian authors who is best known and most appreciated on the international panorama, as protagonist in the double guise of artist and curator of an exhibition itinerary.

The project participated in and won the competition run by the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019), a programme of promotion of contemporary Italian art worldwide by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

Francesco Vezzoli’s curatorial interventions wind their way through Brixia. Archaeological Park of Roman Brescia, where Vittoria Alata is located, and continue into the Republican Shrine, onto the terrace of the Capitolium, into the first and second cell, but also into the Roman Theatre, to then go into the Museum Complex of Santa Giulia. In each of these stages, the layout envisages the presence of a recent sculpture by Vezzoli that will thus enter into a dialogue with the city’s main Roman and Longobard remanants. An exhibition route that will physically take visitors in chronological order through a thousand years of the history of art and architecture.

An eclectic artist, capable of creating a dialogue between the imaginary world of today and sophisticated historical artistic references, Vezzoli his always addressed his poetics at ancient art, connecting it to the past and its icons. His practice winds its way among various languages, expressions of more or less remote past time in the history of humanity, and turns it into an interplay of references and mixtures from high and low culture, from classical culture, solemn, eternal, to pop culture, a media-based, fleeting meteor.

Other works featured in the curatorial intervention
Portrait of Sophia Loren as the muse of antiquity (after Giorgio De Chirico), 2011
Lo sguardo di Adriano, 2018
Portrait of Kim Kardashian (ante litteram), 2018