What an incredible Venice Biennale week.
It was an honor to curate Keita Miyazaki’s museum show “From Water to Form,” a dialogue between fragility and transformation, set in celebration of the permanent collection of Japanese artefacts assembled by Prince Enrico di Bornone and now housed at MAO Ca’ Pesaro.
Alongside this, we also developed a site specific public sculpture on Giudecca Island, curated together with @pierpaolo.scelsi and @ilaricera , opening a great conversation between water, material, and craftsmanship.
A week entirely surrounded by artists, samurai and venetian canals!
I had the privilege to curate a presentation of works by Teodora Axente at Saint George’s Church in Mayfair, London.
Set within the church’s historic interiors, the exhibition creates a dialogue between contemporary painting and sacred space. At its center, Stabbing the Sin A White Lily is Blooming stages a powerful scene of confrontation and transformation, where Saint George slays the dragon as a white lily emerges, symbol of purity and renewal.
Axente extends her vision into sculpture, reimagining the cross with a Pietà protected by Faith, Hope, and Charity, and grounded by Peace. Elsewhere, a red-clad figure beside discarded armor reflects courage as an inner, psychological act.
Special thanks are extended to Roderick Neil Stephen Leece, BA, MA, and the entire church team for their generous support and collaboration.
“We are very lucky to be Italian.”
🍕🎨🖼️🍝🇮🇹
I’m truly grateful to have shared my story and journey in this feature for @rai_it in the program dedicated to celebrating Italian excellence around the world.
It was a pleasure to talk about my career in the art world and my life in London, a city that has given me so much, while I continue to carry Italian culture and identity with me every day. 🇮🇹
A heartfelt thank you to the entire Rai Italia team for this beautiful feature and for telling my story @lucavnncc and Malou
A special thanks to @giorgioarmani for dressing me with timeless elegance, and to @fpjourneofficial for the incredible watch thanks to @shawnggm and @ludovica_pozzo and @mynameispietro
Everything started when I found a copy of Logging for the Darkness with a dedication by Peter Beard.
The book was written by Kamante Gatura, the young injured Kikuyu boy who lived and worked at Karen Blixen’s farm and later with Beard in his Hog Ranch, sharing stories that inspired Out of Africa. Told in Swahili, these tales carry the rhythms, memories, and oral traditions of Kenya, quietly preserving a world at risk of disappearing.
The book was so difficult to publish that Peter Beard had to ask Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to write a text, simply to make sure it would be handed down.
I have always been deeply drawn to Peter Beard’s life and photographs, and that dedication was the spark. From there came the curiosity, then the journey, then Kenya itself.
It was an incredible experience, suspended between Out of Africa’s elegance and Peter Beard’s wild, untamed essence.
Thank you to @maisonkaizen for making this possible.
It was a true honour to curate Luce che Affiora at Museo Civico di Urbino in Galleria Albani together with Luca Baroni @luca__baroni
This museum show brings Riccardo Guarneri into dialogue with Rembrandt van Rijn, tracing a luminous thread across centuries. Guarneri, now 92, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1975 and again in 2017, but initially decided to become a painter after a revelatory encounter with Rembrandt’s work in the Netherlands in the late 1950s, when he was there as a jazz musician.
In both artists, light is not an effect but a form of thought: in Rembrandt it emerges from darkness with human intensity, in Guarneri it surfaces delicately, almost imperceptibly, as a quiet breath. Ethereal and restrained, the exhibition invites a slower gaze and a deeper form of attention.
In many ways, this exhibition has been waiting to happen since the late 1950s, and I am deeply grateful we were finally able to make it a reality.
“L’arte è la meraviglia dell’inutile”
-Nicola Samori
Nicola Samori - Classical Collapse
Curated by Demetrio Paparoni, Alberto Rocca and Eike Schmidt
A single exhibition unfolding across two cities, two museums, and one shared vision.
The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples unite to present Classical Collapse.
Conceived as a dual-site dialogue, the exhibition bridges North and South, antiquity and contemporaneity, placing more than fifty works by Samorì in conversation with masterpieces by Raphael, Brueghel, Parmigianino, Ribera, El Greco and others.
At the Ambrosiana, a monumental new painting meets Raphael’s School of Athens, while marble, copper and wood works animate the Biblioteca and the Crypt.
At Capodimonte, a dramatic scenography leads visitors through chiaroscuro, matter and illusion, culminating in Samorì’s visceral reimaginings of the Baroque.
Classical Collapse reveals tradition not as a fixed inheritance but as a living tension, a field of ruptures, rewritings and metamorphoses.
At Not Vital’s Castle in Tarasp, I came across a quote by the South Korean poet Ko Un that stayed with me. A reminder of movement, of not settling too comfortably in one place, of letting the world remain larger than habit.
The world’s too vast
to live in a single place,
or three or four.
Ko Un, Your Pilgrimage, Himalaya Poems
It was an incredible honor and privilege to curate Metamorfosi del Sacro, Teodora Axente’s groundbreaking museum show, together with Michela Eremita @michelaeremita , based on an idea by Cristiano Leone @cristianoleone_
Hosted by the Museo di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena @santamariadellascala it marks the first institutional solo exhibition of Romanian artist Teodora Axente, one of the most intense voices in contemporary European painting. The project is radically site-specific aiming to bridge contemporary art with the rich Italian historical heritage.
Comprising of works created entirely for Santa Maria della Scala, the exhibition unfolds as a journey through spirituality, memory, and transformation. Once a hospital and place of refuge for pilgrims, the museum holds treasures such as Vecchietta’s frescoes, the Veil of the Virgin, and the Nail of the Cross, holy relics that the institution itself was once powerful enough to buy back from the Empress of Constantinople. Teodora Axente draws inspiration from these stories, weaving relics, symbols, and painted installations into her compositions to reinterpret the sacred through the lens of the present.
So deeply honored to have directed this historic exhibition by Keita Miyazaki at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome. @museoetruscovillagiulia
For the first time in the museum’s history, a site-specific installation by a contemporary artist inhabited the ancient Roman nymphaeum, a space where myth, time, and water converged. After five centuries, the fountains of Villa Giulia flowed once again, their waters traveling all the way to the Trevi Fountain, uniting past and present in an invisible current.
This project was made possible thanks to the vision and generosity of Luana Toniolo @luana_toniolo the museum’s director, the curators Pier Paolo and Ilaria, @pierpaolo.scelsi@iaiaomeravigliao the dedicated IUVART team @iuvartitalia , and everyone who worked alongside me to bring this moment to life.
With the invaluable support of the Japanese Embassy in Italy @ambgiappone_italia and the Japanese Cultural Institute in Rome, @jf_rome this exhibition became a bridge between cultures, a gesture of renewal where the waters of Villa Giulia carried the spirit of Japan through the heart of Rome.
