The volume recounts and illustrates the project of the same name, which brought a new cultural offering to Umbria during the summer of 2024, enlivening the region with extraordinary initiatives spanning the ancient and the contemporary. From 15 June, for the first time, it was possible to visit Umbria's fourteen national museums, where contemporary art exhibitions alternated with major exhibitions, performances and installations designed specifically for the various sites, stimulating the eyes and minds of the public. Archaeological parks, Etruscan and Lombard treasures, masterpieces from the Middle Ages and the Baroque period, prehistoric finds and wonderful Renaissance gardens were enriched by dialogue with the work of masters of our time.

This volume presents the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, an exhibition project by Fondazione Merz curated by Claudia Gioia and Beatrice Merz. The exhibition explores art's ability to respond to current and urgent issues and to bring about change, rejecting resignation to immobility. It brings together 20 artists from different generations and backgrounds who make the overcoming and transformation of imposed and supposed limits their artistic grammar.

In renaming the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, Mario Merz's phrase, “Culture strips itself bare and reveals war”, has been added. The reference is to the traditionally complex role of culture in situations of conflict and the need for culture to strip itself of its muffled image in order to highlight its combative nature. This also serves to emphasise the freedom and responsibility of art and culture, as well as the goal of pushing boundaries, especially today, when all the principles of coexistence and law are constantly being overturned, so that new words can emerge to start thinking again in terms of justice and international, social and civil relations.

The exhibition, open from 27 October 2025 to 8 March 2026, features works by the following artists: Heba Y. Amin, Maja Bajević, Mirna Bamieh, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Rossella Biscotti, Monica Bonvicini, Latifa Echakhch, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh/Rozenn Quéré, Cécile B. Evans, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Jasleen Kaur, Katerina Kovaleva, Teresa Margolles, Helina Metaferia, Janis Rafa, Zineb Sedira and Nora Turato.

The volume originates from the exhibition of the same name that the Fondazione Merz, in collaboration with the MAO Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, dedicated to the Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, winner of the fourth edition of the Mario Merz Prize. The exhibition, which ran from 20 February to 18 May 2025, curated by Davide Quadrio with Giulia Turconi, referred in its title to the agricultural practice of removing wilted flowers from a plant to stimulate its growth. Taking up the metaphor of a return to the essential in order to release new energies, the exhibition featured the most representative works of Yto Barrada's artistic research, including films, sculptures, installations, textiles and prints, some of which were created especially for the occasion. The book includes an introduction by Beatrice Merz, texts by the exhibition curators and an essay by Myriam Ben Salah, independent curator who will curate the French Pavilion at the next Venice Art Biennale dedicated to Yto Barrada. The volume contains a rich collection of images of the exhibition.

Yto Barrada, born in Paris in 1971, lives and works between Tangier and New York. Through an archival approach and connected to public actions, Barrada's installations reveal lesser-known stories, reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalised narratives, and celebrate everyday forms of claiming autonomy. Her work includes different media such as photography, film, sculpture, installation, and engraving. She is the founder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, a cultural centre that has become a historic institution bringing together the Moroccan community to celebrate local and international cinema. Yto Barrada has won numerous awards including the 2019 Roy R. Neuberger Prize, the 2016 Tiger Award and a nomination for the 2016 Prix Marcel Duchamp in Paris, the 2015 Abraaj Group Art Prize and the 2011 Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year award. Barrada's work is included in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum (New York), Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), Guggenheim (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo de Sao Paolo and the Venice Biennales 2007 and 2011.

Luigi Mainolfi (Rotondi, Feb. 16, 1948) is an Italian sculptor who is internationally known as one of the main representatives of the so-called post-conceptual sculpture, which was imposed at the beginning of the 1980s.

Over twenty sculptures by Luigi Mainolfi, created between 1978 and 2020, were housed in the Court of Honor, the Grand Parterre of the Gardens of the Reggia di Venaria and the Chapel of St. Hubert in the summer of 2024.

From the zoomorphic-themed sculptures comes the title, Bestiary, which refers to medieval illuminated codices illustrated with real and imaginary animals, but also to the fantastic zoology of Jorge Luis Borges. This is a recurring theme in Mainolfi, already the author of Bestiario del Sole with its polychrome metamorphic creatures between myth and fairy tale. Mainolfi's Bestiary settles into the architecture, invades the green geometries of the gardens and comes into contact with the living presence of fawns and other wildlife in the park and surrounding forest. Fantastic and mutant creatures, in dialogue with the fairy tales and modeled and painted animals of the Reggia di Venaria, entirely dedicated in the 17th century to the myth of Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt.

Luigi Mainolfi (1948) practices sculpture made with natural materials such as terracotta, plaster, wood, lava stone, or bronze castings, elaborating his own personal language through which he evokes the popular cultures of our country.

Exhibition: Mainolfi. Sculptures. Bestiary
La Venaria Reale, Venaria, Turin, 21th June 2024 - 10th November 2024

The Garden of Resonances invites visitors to walk among eras that mirror each other, forms that seek each other out, artists separated by centuries yet engaged in intense dialogue, as if history were not a line but an echo, a garden in which every creative gesture still vibrates among the branches of time.

The exhibition offers an innovative dialogue between the works preserved in the storerooms of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna – many of which are rarely seen by the public – and the research of sixteen contemporary artists active on the Bologna scene. The connections that emerge in the spaces of the Pinacoteca and MAMbo are symbolic and formal resonances, capable of crossing eras, languages and sensibilities.

The “garden” evoked in the title is a cultural and conceptual image: a space of relationships, tensions and harmonies, in which the human and the natural intertwine and mirror each other: ancient bonds that the processes set in motion by the industrial revolution have caused us to lose sight of, but which still echo in our language, starting with the term “culture”, from the Latin colere, “to cultivate”.

An exhibition that invites visitors to question the meaning of the collection, memory and transformation.

Il Giardino delle Risonanze's artists: Josef Albers, Anna Tappari, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Jean Couy, Cuoghi Corsello, Anton Raphael Mengs, Giorgio Alvise Baffo, Eva Marisaldi, Enrico Serotti, Alessandro Algardi, Francis Bacon, Zapruder, Giorgio De Chirico, Felice Giani, Filippo Scandellari, Daniel Seghers, Erasmus Quellinus Il Giovane, Arianna Zama, Giorgio Morandi, Alessandra Dragoni, Giuseppe De Nittis, Luigi Venturi, Riccardo Baruzzi, Ubaldo Gandolfi, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Emma Masut, Domenico Maria Viani, Italo Zuffi, Hans Fronius, Fanny & Alexander, Luigi Serra, Paolo Chiasera, Otto Dix, Bruno Munari, Jean Arp, Kurt Regschek, Zimmerfrei, Alessandro Tiarini, Tommaso Silvestroni, Valentino Solmi, Filippo Tappi, Maestro Vpr, Federico Zamboni, Guido Cagnacci, Emidio Clementi, Stefano Pilia, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Savinio, Antonio Muzzi, Enrico Romolo

English artist Tony Cragg exhibits ten sculptures that reconnect with the genius loci of the Reggia in a sort of post-modern redefinition of the Baroque and Rococo styles.

After his installation for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Tony Cragg returns to Italy to stage an exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria featuring a selection of ten sculptures created between 1997 and 2021. The sculptures by Cragg, one of the world's most acclaimed contemporary British artists, are set within the permanent exhibition space of the Reggia, starting from the Court of Honour, continuing through the Upper Gardens and ending in the interior hall at the head of the Juvarrian Stables.

These large-scale works, crafted from a variety of materials – from bronze to wood, fibreglass to steel – are all characterised by the artist's signature sinuous, undulating lines, which appear to have been modelled on a giant potter's wheel.

Tony Cragg's work analyses the multiple relationships between human beings and the environment. Using a wide selection of materials and sculptural techniques, the artist explores the complex connection between the figure, the object and the landscape, which for Cragg includes both geological and microbiological systems as well as urban and industrial contexts.