The Blogazine

“The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata”

When recently an article published the list of most influential art collectors in the world, unsurprisingly only one name was Italian. Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli have created an empire both in fashion and art industry. So when last year Ca’ Corner della Regina, a historical palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, became a new temporary home for Fondazione Prada, the announcement came almost as a relief.

Fondazione Prada, under the artistic direction of the superstar curator Germano Celant, has successfully opened its second exhibition in the Venetian venue last thursday. Titled “The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata”, the show is one of the most beautiful ones Venice has offered in a long time. The title of the exhibition refers to the idea, born at the beginning of the 20th century and pursued until the 1970s, that art should pervade the society through ‘the multiplication of objects, experimenting with unprecedented aesthetic and social uses for them’.

Thus, the exhibition, spread throughout the 2 floors of the beautiful Venetian palazzo, presented over six hundred editions – objects familiar across cultures – that ideally should have enabled the artist in creating connections with the society through industry, technology and systems of popular distribution. The exhibition traces the transformation of the idea of uniqueness in art starting from the early 20th century Avant-Gardes – Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Dutch Neoplasticism and German Bauhaus, through pop and optical art, ending with contemporary ‘dematerialization’ of art in the works by Sol LeWitt, Laurence Weiner, Ed Rucha, Dieter Roth.

This language of art, involving the common, banal and everyday, both as medium as well as way of expression, far from being a small utopia, has surely touched the way we perceive both art as well as our daily routine.

“The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata” runs until the 25th of November at Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice.