2025-03-14

In Between - Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection | Locarno

14 March 2025 - 4 January 2026

In Between - Italian and American Art from Ghisla Collection
curated by Federico Sardella
14 March 2025 - 4 January 2026

For its tenth year of activity, the Ghisla Art Collection Foundation of Locarno presents a new exhibition itinerary, articulated around a group of sixty-five works selected from those of Martine and Pierino Ghisla collection, with the aim of rendering the wealth deriving from the possible artistic and cultural dialogue between Italian and American art.

The exhibition IN BETWEEN. Arte italiana e americana dalla Collezione Ghisla, curated by Federico Sardella, is an extraordinary opportunity to give life to a project built through daring combinations and evocative references between languages and artists, between the works and the spaces of the Foundation. In consideration of the combinations and methods adopted during the exhibition, that dismantle the classic linearity of the chronology of art history or of codified groups and movements, the exhibition will present a path – far from linear – aimed at producing a sort of lattice of information that ideally connects the works present and without priority in their “reading”.


Starting from the very first room, the public is presented with an exhibition that exemplifies the entire itinerary and proposes in close dialogue works by Lucio Fontana, Giorgio Griffa, Richard Serra, Frank Stella and Grazia Varisco. The exhibition itinerary continues in the consistent quest for harmony – or fertile disharmony – between Italian authors and their overseas counterparts, avoiding any kind of forcing, but rather conferring solely the work of art with the authority that affords harmony with a peer. The visitor will be met with fruitful and revealing combinations, such as the one between the works of Carla Accardi, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Pietro Consagra, Sergio Fermariello, Keith Haring and Keith Sonnier: different voices, distinct and distant, that speak the same language and dialogue around the sign. The method with which the works of Giosetta Fioroni and Tom Wesselmann were placed close to one another, those of Enrico Baj, Jean-Michel Basquiat and George Condo, or even those of Alberto Burri with Ettore Colla, Louise Nevelson and Giuseppe Uncini, is not dissimilar.


The title of the exhibition would immediately suggest the desire to affirm the possibility of comparison between works and artists belonging to the same historical period, or between works and artists of different nationalities in decades even distant from each other. This further underlines the ways in which the exhibition itinerary has been designed, underscoring the existence of a connective space and highlighting the links, ties and relationships that exist between one work and another, between one author and their colleagues; noting and accentuating the fact that a painting, a sculpture, an installation or a structure are not born into nothing, but must be evaluated within a context. A cultural, historical, geographical context, which takes into account inventions and artistic expressions that previously belonged to the past or subsequently formed part of a future: between one art and another, between one painting and another.