Museum of the Twentieth Century. On display “15 Steps To The Virgin”, the work of Monica Bonvicini, winner of the ACACIA Lifetime Achievement Award 2019

The sculpture is on display in the Sala Fontana until October 23rd and will become part of the Museum's collection

Miilano, 12 October 2019 – Until October 23rd, in the Sala Fontana of the Museo del Novecento, it will be possible to admire, in dialogue with the spatialist “Neon Structure”, “15 Steps To The Virgin” by Monica Bonvicini, the work that won the “ACACIA Lifetime Achievement Award 2019” and donated by the ACACIA Association – Associazione Amici Arte Contemporanea Italiana – to the Museo del Novecento.

The work exhibited in Sala Fontana is just one of the elements that contribute to making up the overall installation, which was created by Monica Bonvicini in 2011 on the occasion of the 54th Venice Biennale, entitled "ILLuminations". That edition of the Biennale was curated by Bice Curiger, who chose the title inspired by the Venetian painter Tintoretto, whose canvases are characterized by an unnatural but very scenographic light.

With the large installation “15 Steps To The Virgin” Bonvicini revisited a work by Tintoretto that still exists in the Church of the Madonna, “The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple” (1552 -1556): a girl, probably the painter's daughter, is preparing to enter the temple by climbing up embroidered and golden stairs. The pomp linked to the many interpretations of the theme "the virgin in the temple", from Giotto to Titian, is transformed in this work into a theater show, a rite of female submission now obsolete and archaic. In the Biennale Bonvicini had created an installation conceived from a series of "islands", each of which was composed of different types of stairs and steps, built with different materials but all in a precarious manner, just like in a theater or television stage, placing comparing the baroque perspective with the modernist one, and reflecting the idea of spectacle that always accompanies the Venice Biennale.

The sculpture on display, a staircase of 10 steps with a mirrored surface which is part of the overall installation, thus establishes a significant dialogue with the "Neon Structure" [1951] by Lucio Fontana, conceived for the central staircase of the IX Triennale of Milan.

Monica Bonvicini's sculpture becomes part of the heritage of the Museo del Novecento together with the other works already donated by the ACACIA Association, by Mario Airò, Rosa Barba, Rossella Biscotti, Gianni Caravaggio, Maurizio Cattelan, Roberto Cuoghi, Rä di Martino, Lara Favaretto, Linda Fregni Nagler, Francesco Gennari, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Marzia Miglior, Adrian Paci, Paola Pivi, Luca Trevisani, Grazia Toderi, Tatiana Trouvé, Marcella Vanzo, Nico Vascellari, Francesco Vezzoli.

The contemporary art collection of the Museo del Novecento is thus enriched, a constantly evolving collection to which the happy collaboration between public and private entities contributes, with the common objective of preserving and deepening the study of the most recent artistic experiments.

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