Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, 13 December 2019 – Tomorrow, Saturday 14 December at 11 am, the councilor for Transformation and Civic Services Roberta Cocco will speak at the double inauguration at the Cittadella degli Archivi, in via Gregorovius 15, of the exhibitions “Baj and the anarchist Pinelli” and “Artist's Walls 2019".

The exhibition “Baj and the anarchist Pinelli”, curated by Dr. Anna Contro, is created in collaboration with the chair of History of Contemporary Art of the State University of Milan and reconstructs the events linked to the work “I funerali dell 'anarchist Pinelli' by Enrico Baj, whose exhibition at Palazzo Reale on 17 May 1972 was suspended due to the murder of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi that same morning. This is the same work that the gallerist Giorgio Marconi recently donated to the Municipality of Milan and which will be housed inside Palazzo Citterio.

In addition to some documents preserved in the municipal archive - the dummy of the exhibition catalogue, created in marker by Baj himself, the correspondence between the Municipality of Milan, Marconi and the artist on the suspension of the exhibition due to the Calabresi murder - the catalogs will be on display and some period photographs, a text from the Historical Studies department which narrates the social situation of Milan in 1969 and the events that led to the death of Pinelli and Calabresi and the documentary/interview made by Swiss-Italian TV with the artist will be broadcast Baj in the days immediately following the postponement of the inauguration.

Also speaking at the inauguration will be Giuseppe Lardieri, president of Municipality 9, Fortunato Zinni, survivor of the Piazza Fontana massacre and Roberta Cerini, widow of Enrico Baj.

The second inauguration of the morning concerns the third and final cycle of redevelopment of the external walls of via Gregorovius, curated by Rossella Farinotti.

Eleven new artists were invited to paint the walls: Roberto Amoroso (author of “Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano”), Elisa Bertaglia (author of “Lea Vergine: the other half of the avant-garde”), Federico Cantale (“Arturo Martini, Palazzo Reale, 1985”), Claudio Corfone (“The outskirts of Milan”), Massimo Dalla Pola (“The Marchiondi Spagliardi institute”), Gabriele Grones (“Expo Milan 2015: the botanical gardens”), Annaklara Galli (“Gianni Versace, Castello Sfrozesco, 1992”), Marta Mezynska (“The Milanese skyscrapers”), Jimmy Milani (“Mario Sironi, Palazzo Reale, 1985”), Albert Pinya (“The historic puppet company of the Colla brothers in Milan”) and Milena Sgambato (“The Milanese women's institutes”).

Each artist worked with a process of decoration and redevelopment of the external walls of the headquarters in via Gregorovius through painting respecting a defined chromatic scale - gold, green, red, black, grey, white - and in relation to the context, the place and the history of Milan.

The work of selection, coordination and construction of the external walls was accompanied by events, talks and cultural events aimed at broadening the Cittadella audience to discover the place, the documents contained and, naturally, the site-specific and permanent works of art created including the latest ones, inaugurated on 5 May 2019, by Davide Allieri, T-yong Chung and Giorgio Pagani for the Fernanda Wittgens Garden in Cittadella.