Collection

William Anastasi was born in Philadelphia in 1933 and moved to New York in 1962, where he died in 2023. He was a self-taught artist who approached art after learning about the works of Duchamp, which inspired him to become one of the first American conceptual artists. He moved to New York and befriended John Cage, with whom he entertained an assiduous relationship, spending many days playing chess with him - another Duchampian legacy shared by the two artists. 

Barry was born in New York in 1936 and currently lives and works in New Jersey. Considered one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art, his practice focuses on themes of space and language, transcending the physical limits of the artwork itself. Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media (including radio waves and telepathy), challenging what would be accepted as “typical” artistic practice or experience. Through his works and performances, the artist questions the limits and the true nature of perception, our senses possibilities in relation with often unknown and intangible elements: Barry’s conceptual drive was to produce art that wasn’t aesthetic and which without documentation would be completely invisible to the eye.

Cadere was born as Andrei Cădere in Warsaw in 1934, of Romanian and French descent. Having spent some years in Portugal, his family returned to Romania after the Second World War and there he attended the Academy of Bucharest.
In 1967, he moved to Paris where he pursued a career as an artist, developing an individual conceptual practice which focused on barres de bois rond (round bars of wood). Informed by op art and growing trends in minimalism and conceptual art, Cadere developed his first barre de bois in 1970.
The batons became the principal prop within his performative events. With a baton in hand, the artist would infiltrate art gallery and museum openings to which he had not been invited. As well as bringing his batons into the art world, Cadere also presented them in public spaces (including restaurants and subways), announcing ‘exhibitions’ where he would appear between specific hours every day over a certain period of time, engaging passers-by with discussions about his baton and art. The artist died in Paris in 1978.

Born in California in 1935, De Maria began his career at a young age in San Francisco, playing drums in jazz, rock, and avant-garde bands. He then studied painting and, in 1960, moved to New York, where he dedicated himself to sculpture. In his sculptures, land works, and installations, De Maria explores the relationship between the relative and the absolute, using basic geometric components to produce sublime repetitions. By arranging forms according to mathematical sequences, he worked at the intersections of Minimalism, conceptual art, and land art - drawing attention to the limits of gallery spaces, prioritizing bodily awareness, and locating the content of an artwork in the viewer.
De Maria dies in New York in 2013.

García is born in Valladolid, Spain, in 1965, she lives and works in Oslo.
The artist often works with film, performance, and theater. Her research focuses on contemporary history, ethics, and politics. García represented Spain at the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011. 

Born in 1975 in Monclova, Mexico, García Torres describes himself as a conceptual artist who makes work about the history of conceptual art. He uses several media—including photography, film, performance, and printed matter—to reprise or respond to past works of other artists. As he explains, “my work doesn’t really become a remake of the conceptual story but more like a second rehearsal.” 

Dan Graham has been analysing the relationships between architectural environments and their inhabitants for over fifty years with diversified conceptual art practices that include installations, performances, videos, photographs and books. Starting in the 1970s he has focused on building architectural pavilions from transparent or mirrored glass that he has installed all over the world and now feature in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Dia Art Foundation (New York) and many other institutions too.

Ion Grigorescu was born in 1945 in Bucharest.
A painter by training, he belongs to a generation of underground Romanian conceptual artists active during the dark years of Ceausescu’s regime.
The dictator appointed «official» artists to sculpt numerous embellished and iconic self-celebratory statues to be paraded through the streets of Romania. Ceausescu also ordered the demolition of countless private citizens’ homes to build the People’s Palace, his own private mansion. As in most Soviet countries between the 1970s and 1980s, the arts in Romania were mainly subservient to the celebration of political leaders. Artists like Grigorescu, who dissented with the political agenda of the government, refused to put their work to the service of propaganda and did so through the ploy of immateriality. The anti-commercial and non-marketable nature of such works informed a subtly revolutionary poetics.

On Kawara was born in Japan in 1932 and lived and worked in New York from 1965 until his passing in 2014. For over fifty years, Kawara explored the relationship with history, the passage of time, and its impact on human existence through a rigorous and radical artistic practice. As one of the most important conceptual artists, Kawara meticulously and obsessively appropriated the essence of time to redefine the very concept of eternity. In 1969, he created a ten-volume book, One Million Years, in which he enumerates, one by one, the last billion years that have passed, giving materiality and physical presence to the passage of time.

An internationally acclaimed artist and a figure central to the German minimalist movement, Charlotte Posenenske (1930-1985) worked mainly with sculpture, and received numerous accolades in Germany and from the international scene up until her decision, in 1968, to dedicate her life to sociology.

Born in Stresa in 1943, Emilio Prini has taken part in many exhibitions of the Arte Povera group since the Sixties. His oeuvre bears political and conceptual implications that reify in the objecthood of his works: manifestos, statements, programmatic declarations, simple exhibition invitations. After showing at numerous international exhibitions until the 1970s, he progressively disappeared from the art scene. His immaterial and enigmatic practice contributed to the consolidation of an auratic myth around his figure. Prini died in Rome in 2016.