Contemporary Art Service

The service

The Laboratory

Location

Although the Contemporary Art Service holds an office at Fortezza da Basso, it supports the conservation work of all the OPD’s departments, each of which is historically specialised in specific materials. This activity concerns cultural heritage from the advent of industrial materials and procedures (roughly in the mid-19th century) to the present day.

History

Set up in 2021, this service aims to coordinate the Opificio’s activities in a field that maintains a certain degree of continuity with art of the past but that has often introduced new issues which have created many debates in recent years.

The use of new materials, the expansion of art forms and fields (including crossing extracultural territories), the introduction of ephemeral means, the chance to directly interact with the artist, the decay of matter as a form of expression and the focus on conception as opposed to execution are in fact only some of the aspects that can lead to an actual shift in the approach to conservation, from a theoretical, methodological and technical point of view.

Though having a solid base of support from the Opificio’s consolidated tradition, contemporary art represents an important opportunity to broaden the institute’s research themes.

Activity, research, training

The Contemporary Art service inherits the important experiences gained by the Institute’s departments, which include the restoration completed in 2015 of Alchemy, a revolutionary painting by Jackson Pollock from 1947 (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice); and that of the memorial honouring the Italian victims of Nazi concentration camps, a collaborative work by the BBPR studio, Pupino Samonà, Luigi Nono, and Primo Levi installed in 1980 in Auschwitz and relocated at EX3 in Gavinana, Florence after the Opificio’s restoration in 2019.

Since 2021, the service has dealt with important projects alongside major institutions, including: the restoration of Felt piece (with the contributions of the Textiles Department), one of Robert Morris‘s famous felt works from 1993; and Sol Lewitt‘s Wall Drawing #736 Rectangles of colour from 1993 (in collaboration with the Wall Paintings and Stucco Decorations Department). Both artworks come from Centro per le arti contemporanee Luigi Pecci in Prato. Other noteworthy projects have been carried out on emblematic 20th-century artworks such as the first Boîte en valise made by Marcel Duchamp for Peggy Guggenheim in 1941 (with the Paper and Membranous Materials Department), now at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice; and the great bronze statue Warrior with Shield donated by the artist Henry Moore to Florence in 1972 (in collaboration with the Bronze and Ancient Weapons Restoration Department), now owned by the British Institute of Florence.

Important research and consultation activities have been launched with, among others, the Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, and the MAXXI in Rome.

The field of contemporary art conservation is also fully integrated into the Opificio’s training activities, both in the training programs of the OPD Higher Education School, through specialised modules, and research increasingly developed for diploma theses, as well as in the two editions (2011 and 2021-22) of a specialisation course in Conservation and Management of Contemporary Artworks, the latter of which was accomplished with the cooperation of FOP-Fondazione Opificio.