An Idea of beauty

edited by Franziska Nori

exhibition catalogue: Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, CCCS Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina
29 March-28 July 2013

The works of eight contemporary artists from around the world—Vanessa Beecroft, Chiara Camoni, Andreas Gefeller, Alicja Kwade, Jean Luc Mylayne, Isabel Rocamora, Anri Sala and Wilhelm Sasnal—sketch out a path to reflect on the experience of beauty. Each artist dialogues with the visitors’ sensitivities, sparking universal questions. Is beauty a value, an objective or an instrument for artists? The works try to stimulate physical and emotional participation. The artists exalt the theme of the subjectivity of vision, producing and provoking in the observers individual responses that can become an instrument for new connections with others and with the world. On the one hand, techniques and traditional art genres are compared and reinvented, such as the themes of the landscape and the human figure. On the other, however, they listen to nature, capturing moments and fragments, or they reflect on the power of beauty in its social dimension and ability to transform each of us. Today rediscovering an idea of beauty means setting up a different experience of reality, in search of a value, a spiritual moment or the in-depth examination of an intellectual intuition. Beauty thus springs forth from our ability to rethink how we normally see, grasp and recognize it in an object, moment or everyday gesture.