New Project Space opens at Palazzo Strozzi: starring Giulia Cenci with The Hollow Men
Until August 31, the site-specific project can be seen with free admission
Florence welcomes a new space for contemporary art: the Project Space at Palazzo Strozzi is born, and it does so by inaugurating with a powerful and visionary exhibition by Giulia Cenci, among the most interesting voices of emerging Italian art. The project, titled The Hollow Men, is curated by Arturo Galansino, general director of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.
With the new Project Space, Palazzo Strozzi expands its cultural offerings, creating an environment accessible directly from the courtyard, designed as an experimental platform for contemporary artists. A fluid space, dedicated to research and production, which joins the historic rooms of the Piano Nobile, the Strozzina and the Cortile, confirming the palace's vocation to be a dynamic laboratory of the present.
Giulia Cenci: the hollow men, Palazzo Strozzi, Project Space (photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze)Giulia Cenci's exhibition, created especially for this new space, is an engaging site-specific project that interweaves sculpture, installation and drawing. The title quotes the famous poem The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot (1925), and just as in the poem, here we encounter uncertain figures, suspended between life and oblivion, fragility and mutation.
Through industrial elements, waste and salvaged materials, the artist builds a landscape populated by hybrid creatures - somewhere between human, animal and plant - that seem to emerge from a post-traumatic world. Aluminum bodies, enigmatic faces, precarious postures: each work challenges the hierarchies between nature and artifice, between what we recognize and what destabilizes us.
Giulia Cenci: the hollow men, Palazzo Strozzi, Project Space (photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze)The heart of the installation is occupied by an imposing sculpture composed of Archimedes screws, around which move isolated and alienating figures. In the adjoining room, a three-headed creature seems to balance unsteadily, while the last room houses a series of drawings that restore the intimacy of the artist's creative process.
Giulia Cenci tackles the theme of transience and hybridization in the contemporary world, putting her work in tension with the solemn and historical architecture of Palazzo Strozzi. A vivid contrast, giving rise to a powerful dialogue between past and present, matter and memory.
Project Space, Palazzo Strozzi – Florence
Opening hours: Every day from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursday extended opening until 11 p.m.
(last admission one hour before closing)
Free admission