FAI presents the donation of 108 new works from the Panza Collection and opens the exhibition “Ex Natura”, a new exhibition project at the Villa e Collezione Panza with 46 new works by 10 different artists.

A nucleus of 108 works by 26 European and American artists, part of the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, until now conserved by his family, is the exceptional donation that the FAI is presenting at Villa Panza in Varese, an 18th century nobleman’s residence with a large park, which was the collector’s home, donated by him to the Foundation in 1996 together with a collection of 141 works by mainly American contemporary artists.

The donation, shared by his children and on behalf of his wife, Rosa Giovanna Panza di Biumo, who has always been at the collector’s side in his research, sharing his spirit with equal passion, is yet another generous gesture by the family.

This gesture is based on a concrete, civil and far-sighted purpose: the works donated will thus be indissolubly linked to the Villa, preserved and enhanced by FAI, and will enrich the overview of the history of the collection that is already preserved here, offering the public an even better understanding of the vision of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, of which this special place is a vivid reflection.

Villa Panza, in fact, is not a contemporary art museum, but the home of the collector and his family, which in particular reflects and bears witness to his work, his sensitivity and his culture, and the path of his research, which spans at least three generations of artists, from the 1950s to 2010, and numerous different artistic movements, from minimal and conceptual art to environmental art, light and colour.

The collection housed here and its display, conceived by him down to the smallest detail – reasoned, sophisticated and highly original, attentive to the relationship between architecture, nature, furnishings and works of art, many of which are site-specific – are a work themselves: the work of the collector, of which the Villa offers the public a unique experience, and which thanks to this donation will be even better understood and enjoyed.

The new nucleus of works enriches the heritage in qualitative and quantitative terms: Villa Panza will be second only to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in terms of the number of works in the Giuseppe Panza di Biumo collection, which can thus also be the subject of rotations, with a view to their better preservation, exchanges and collaborations with national and international museums, and temporary exhibition projects aimed at investigating certain parts and some founding themes.

The exhibition “EX NATURA. New works from the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo” is the first of these projects, which will give new impetus to the cultural enhancement of the Villa e Collezione Panza, and which inaugurates a four-year programme of exhibitions devoted to different themes that run through the collector’s collection and research: from “nature and form” – this year’s theme – to “rhythm and dynamics”, “sign and message” and “light and colour”.

The exhibitions, held annually, are based on the display of part of the donation, in dialogue with works from the already permanent collection and with the addition of loans from museums and institutions that hold other groups of works from the Collezione Panza. During their duration – in May – they include a further “exhibition within the exhibition”, through the intervention of contemporary artists not necessarily collected by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, but nevertheless close to the themes of his research, for further study and new suggestions on the theme of the year.

THE DONATION
The nucleus of 108 works donated to FAI belongs to the second and third phase of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s research, as defined by the collector himself. The first phase or collection, begun in 1954, moves from European informal art to abstract expressionism with forays into pop art, and is today for the most part conserved at MOCA in Los Angeles; the second phase or collection, composed between 1968 and 1976, well represented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and already present in a small part at Villa Panza, concentrates, instead, on minimal, conceptual, environmental art and light art; the third phase, finally, realised since 1986, and the founding part of the original donation to FAI, opens up to new perspectives with organic art, the art of small objects and the art of colour.

The donated works make it possible to delve more deeply into these last two phases of the collector’s research, not only through works by new artists, but also thanks to the integration of works by some already present in the permanent collection of Villa Panza.

Represented in the donation is American conceptual art by Robert Barry (1936), Jan Dibbets (1941), Joseph Kosuth (1945), Lawrence Weiner (1942-2021) and Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), and the minimal art of Jene Highstein (1942-2013) and Richard Nonas (1936-2021).

Exponents of British art also appear, such as Hamish Fulton (1946) and Richard Long (1945). Also included are works by artists belonging, according to Giuseppe Panza’s definition, to the group of organic art: Emil Lukas (1964), Ross Rudel (1960) and Peter Shelton (1951). Included are colour research in monochrome painting by Anne Appleby (1954), Sonia Costantini (1956), Sean Shanahan (1960) and Phil Sims (1940). Some works by David Goerk (1952) and Robert Tiemann (1936 – 2016), devoted to small objects, Barry X Ball (1955) and Lawrence Carroll (1954-2019), and sound art projects by Michael Brewster (1946-2016) are also in the collection. The donation also includes works by artists such as Cioni Carpi (1923-2011), Giorgio Colombo (1945), Chiara Dynys (1958), Piero Fogliati (1930-2016) and Maurizio Mochetti (1940), underlining Panza’s interest in a specific research of Italian art.

THE EXHIBITION
From November 10th, 2022 until October 1^st, 2023, FAI has opened “Ex Natura. New works from the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo” to the public. The exhibition investigates the relationship between two polarities, nature and form, and the way they reformulate from artist to artist, from work to work, giving rise and life to consonances and dissonances, readings and suggestions, meanings and messages, some of which, starting from nature as a source of inspiration and engine of creation, are early warnings to protect the environment.

On display are 46 works by 10 different artists, corresponding to 10 monographic sections, introduced by quotations by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo from his autobiographical volume “Ricordi di un collezionista”.

For the occasion, FAI has produced a guide accessible via smartphone with fact sheets on the individual artists and for each one, in podcast form, the complete readings from the aforementioned volume, which, amidst curious anecdotes and profound reflections, are the best accompaniment to the visit, for understanding the works on show, but also and above all the collecting choices of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.

Of the works on display, 30 are the subject of a donation and 16 are on loan from the Collezione Panza Mendrisio, the part of the collection still held and managed by the Panza family.

The tour starts on the first floor of the villa where, next to the “poor forms” of Lawrence Carroll, of which Giuseppe Panza highlights “the hidden, non-obvious beauty […] that has roots, that is part of our being”, there are works in organic materials from the natural world, such as the sculptures of Christiane Löhr that create timeless forms with delicate flower stalks and impalpable heaps of seeds. Emil Lukas also stages the natural world by imprisoning it in panels of rigorous geometry.

The path is enriched by works that investigate the organicity of forms, abstract objects with an evident relationship to the physical world: from Ross Rudel‘s “vital forms” to Peter Shelton‘s “organic forms”, which refer to the human body. Even a “machine”, a work by Piero Fogliati, leads back to the forms, this time sonorous, of nature. This is followed by works by David Goerk, who creates abstract forms that have no apparent relationship to other things, and yet are borrowed from ordinary objects or from natural and astral symbols.

The exhibition continues on the ground floor, in the two former stables of the Villa, where nature triumphs, declined in its relationship to man. On the walls of the Scuderia Grande, two gigantic works by Hamish Fulton tell of his love for nature, the driving force behind artistic creation: his experience of walking in direct, physical contact with the forms of the landscape is translated into evocative conceptual forms, into words and signs; in the same space is a floor work by Richard Long, Cross of Sticks, from 1983, in which the artist starts from the very action of walking, returning that experience in a geometric form composed of materials gathered from nature. The tour concludes in the Scuderia Piccola with eight works by Gregory Mahoney (1955) investigating the relationship between the human being, nature and the cosmos: for the artist, the discarded element, used and reworked, is a trace of the cosmic time that corrodes matter and of nature, more powerful than man and eternal, that reappropriates it.

This exploration around the theme of nature and form allows for a reinterpretation of some works by artists from Villa Panza‘s permanent collection that the collector himself places in the line of research of organic art such as Allan Graham (1943-2019), Robert Tiemann (1936-2016), Martin Puryear (1941) and Meg Webster (1944).

The exhibition – curated by Anna Bernardini and Marta Spanevello – is accompanied by a Magonza Editore Catalogue with texts by Anna Bernardini, Emanuele Coccia and entries by Sara Fontana and Marta Spanevello.