MIC Faenza is among 40 projects – (7 in Emilia Romagna) selected as part of the public notice PAC2024 – Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity with a total investment of 3.5 million euros, for the acquisition, production and enhancement of works of contemporary art and creativity destined for the Italian public heritage.
The Faenza MIC was awarded funding to acquire “The Foot,” 1983, by Luigi Mainolfi, a sculptor known internationally for his poetic research expressed through the medium of terracotta. His works investigate, through meticulous but powerful gestures, the cultural memory, our genesis, and the popular expression of terracotta. The earth becomes an element of reflection on his birthplaces (Campania), the mother earth of all civilizations and the archetypes of man, in a contemporary, poetic and elegant reinterpretation of our origins and archaic.
The Faenza MIC has an international collection of contemporary sculpture; Mainolfi is one of the artists most often exhibited but whose works were not owned. The choice therefore to acquire a historicized work of his production completes the path on the 1980s, a golden period of the relocation of terracotta and ceramics in contemporary art, with an undisputed return to “Mother Earth” as an artistic expression. This wall sculpture would go in dialogue with other authors such as Nanni Valentini, Pino Spagnulo, Carlo Zauli, to name a few names, already present at MIC Faenza, who expressed great poetics precisely in that decade.
Of “The Foot,” Mainolfi himself writes, “sometimes I miss the parts of the earth during flight, the details blur, I get closer and distinguish the forests, the waters, the roar of a volcano spitting life into history, the art of the lands. I sense the breath of the mountains where man has always found, in his skin, a cave in which to think and dream, and I wrap myself in the sculpture of the air, in the fire of art.”
The project is supported by PAC2024 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Luigi Mainolfi, The Foot, 1983, photo by Michele Alberto Sereni
