Art in Act Exibition

A journey across different places and eras, from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Etruria, and the Greco-Roman world to the pre-modern cultures of present-day Mexico, Mali, Peru, and Cambodia. Works by some of the great masters of art history, including Giovanni Pisano, Michelangelo, and Auguste Rodin, are displayed alongside sculptures by contemporary artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Huma Bhabha, Robert Gober, Francesco Vezzoli, and Danh Vo, who have taken the fragment as a starting point for exploring new expressive possibilities.
Featuring more than eighty works and artefacts from some of the world’s most important museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, the exhibition explores the fragment from a new perspective: not simply as the remnant of a lost whole, but as an autonomous object, capable of preserving traces of memory .
A fragment may result from a deliberate choice, or it may tell a story whose traces it still bears: ancient and modern iconoclasm, wars, revolutions, acts of vandalism, and natural disasters, such as the Protected content in Florence. The exhibition thus reflects on the artistic, political, and symbolic value that a sculpture acquires following its fragmentation, and on the ability of the fragment to become a tool for knowledge and imagination—a living presence that continues to question and engage with our present.