Almost 400,000 visitors to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Soon to open: the 4th exhibition in the series of Themes&Variations, followed by an unmissable private collection from Mannerism to Surrealism, and by a homage to Azimut/h, the gallery/review of Manzoni and Castellani.
2013 saw record attendance numbers at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Over the year the Venice museum counted 394,253 visitors in 316 opening days, with a daily average of 1,248 people. This number includes 7,656 students and schoolteachers participating in ‘A Scuola di Guggenheim’, the museum’s educational program, 1,700 children who took part in the Sunday ‘Kids Day’ workshops, and more than 8,400 guests on the occasion of openings, private views and special events.
The recently closed exhibition dedicated to Post-Impressionist avant-gardes in Paris counted 108,776 visitors in 89 days of opening. Installation has begun for the opening of the fourth edition of the exhibition Themes&Variations. The Empire of Light (1 February – 14 April), a curatorial formula, initiated in 2002 by Luca Massimo Barbero, which sets out to interpret anew works in the Venice museum by looking at them through a theme and its variations. 2014’s theme is light, which will lead visitors through a sequence of surprising juxtapositions and original visual dialogues between works from different generations: from Matisse and to Basilico, from Fontana to Kapoor, from Degas to Rothko, and from Richter to Sugimoto. The exhibition includes, in its final gallery, a tribute to Fausto Melotti (1901-1986).
From 25 April to 4 May: space for our youngest visitors. The museum is readying to host a vast collective mosaic, the outcome of the second edition of Kids Creative Lab, an Italy-wide project promoted by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and OVS, best- known fast fashion retailer in Italy. The efforts of more than 300,000 primary school children will fill the temporary exhibition galleries, using an Artist’s Kit of vari-colored tesserae, supported by Trend, the celebrated mosaic company of Vicenza that has donated all the materials, using re-cycled glass.
The Summer exhibition sees the arrival of more than 100 paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and natural curiosities from a private collection in Switzerland. From 24 May to 31 August, For Your Eyes Only. A Private Collection, from Mannerism to Surrealism will combine masterworks from across the centuries, by Arcimboldo, Böcklin, Brauner, Brueghel the Elder, de Chirico, Dalí, Ernst, Fuseli, Magritte, Man Ray Moreau, Warhol, and many others.
The year winds up with an exceptional event, an homage to Azimut, the name of both an art gallery and a review founded in 1959 by Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani. With AZIMUT/H. Continuity and the New, from 20 September to 19 January 2015, curator Luca Massimo Barbero will examine the international art scene in the late 1950s and early 60s as seen through the lens of Azimut/h, a fulcrum of the avant-garde in Italy and abroad at that time.