Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Entrances are limited in compliance with government regulations, booking is recommended

Milan, 6 March 2020 - The exhibition “Roberto Cotroneo. In the theater of art". 

Scheduled from today to 29 March 2020, with free entry, the exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of Milan | Culture, Palazzo Reale and organized by Civita Mostre e Musei, and curated by Denis Curti. 

The over 50 photos on display are the result of a long work lasting five years, from 2015 to 2019, by the writer and essayist Roberto Cotroneo, who for some years has combined his writing work with that of photography, observing and photographing the public at the art in museums and galleries, focusing on its movements, postures, expressions, the ability to cross spaces and places. 

There are many important photographers who have taken images in museums or art galleries, but Cotroneo uses an absolutely original approach, overturning the relationship between work of art and visitor and adding it all together in a photographic intention.

As in the theater of art, the protagonist of the scene is the public, who, by interacting with the work of art, essentially "does", creates the museum. The stage of the representation therefore moves from the pedestal of the work to the space inhabited by the public, without which the museum loses meaning and meaning. A Copernican revolution in the museum concept, which classically imagines exhibition spaces as perfect places, with an audience that looks at the works. 

Cotroneo's photographs instead invite the visitor into a sort of theater in which the actors enter the stage of art: the center of gravity shifts, and we will have an audience observing an audience.

“These photographs by Roberto Cotroneo resemble a long embrace and the effect is that of someone who has managed to define a context, far from documentation and in favor of emotions. I think there is a notable amount of humanity in these shots. There is harmony and poetry, silence and passion, talent and competence. Roberto, as the great storyteller that he is, manages to put into images the difference between seeing and looking, between hearing and listening, between eating and tasting. His work, more than a reportage, seems like a militant exercise dedicated to the resistance of memory,” says Denis Curti. 

“In this theater of art on which I worked for five years, between 2015 and 2019, there is history, there are lines, there is waiting, the observation of movements, often there is space. But it's like betting against the works. It's about bringing back to the center, like an unrepeatable event, a visitor who doesn't add to the spaces but now changes the rules: a reversal. The opera, the artistic masterpiece, has become an audience that wants new actors on the stage of its theater. A paradox, a reversal, in our new times”, declares Roberto Cotroneo.

Info shows

199.15.11.21

(Monday to Friday 9.00 - 18.00; Saturday 9.00 - 12.00)

From abroad: 02.89096942

mostre@civita.it

www.palazzorealemilano.it                                                                                                                                                    

Opening hours

Monday 14.30pm - 19.30pm

Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday: 9.30 - 19.30

Thursday and Saturday: 9.30am – 22.30pm

Last admission one hour before closing                    

FREE ADMISSION

(In compliance with the Prime Ministerial Decree of 1 March 2020 COVID-19, admissions to the exhibition will be limited)

Photo gallery