From 12 October 2024 to 03 March 2025, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents the largest museum retrospective organized in Italy dedicated to Marina Apollonio (b. 1940), one of the key figures of international Optical and Kinetic art, who was supported and collected by Peggy Guggenheim.
Organized by independent art historian and curator Marianna Gelussi, the exhibition features approximately one hundred works on loan from the artist’s collection, as well as from national and international museums, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, MART in Rovereto, the Neue Gallery in Graz, the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and Ritter Museum of Waldenbuch, Germany, the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, and Fondation Villa Datris de l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France. Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle is a deserved tribute to the Triestine artist, tracing her career from 1963 to the present. The show highlights her rigorous visual investigations, encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing, as well as static, moving, and environmental works, black and white paintings, chromatic experimentations, and a variety of media and techniques.
This homage in the galleries of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Apollonio’s adoptive city, where she lived as a girl and took her first steps as an artist, is particularly fitting, as it also highlights the role of visionary collector Peggy Guggenheim in her career. Indeed, in 1968, after having visited the artist’s solo exhibition at the Galleria Barozzi in Venice, Guggenheim commissioned Relief no. 505 (ca. 1968), currently part of the museum’s collection, which testifies to her support of young Italian avant-garde artists. The exhibition follows other exhibitions organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection devoted to Italian postwar artists supported by the U.S. patron, including Edmondo Bacci and his recent retrospective, and Tancredi Parmeggiani.
Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, edited by Marsilio Arte, with essays by exhibition curator Marianna Gelussi, art historian Arnaud Pierre, art historian and Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Max Hollein, and an interview of the artist with curator and art historian Cecilia Alemani.
Curated by Marianna Gelussi
