Antonio Dalle Nogare’s private collection was born in the mid-eighties. At the heart of the collection lies his passion for conceptual and minimal art, with works by the masters of the second half of the 20th century. Artworks by contemporary artists are continuously added to this fundamental core, and they find themselves in a conceptual dialogue with the great masters in the exhibition rooms.
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.
Alighiero Boetti – or Alighiero e Boetti, as he signed himself from1971 – was born in Turin in 1940. He made his debut with the Arte Povera movement in January 1967, and in 1972 he moved to Rome. A year prior, he discovered a passion for Afghanistan and entrusted his first works to embroiderers from that country, including the Mappe, the colored planispheres that he would continuously review over the years to mirror the changing political developments across the world.
The eclectic but rigorous practice of Monica Bonvicini (Venice, 1965) explores the relationship between architecture, power, gender and sexuality, space and time. This results in works that question the meaning of art-making, the ambiguity of language, and the limits and possibilities associated with the ideal of freedom. Bonvicini’s art is sarcastic, upfront and full of historical and socio-political references; it never refrains from establishing a critical connection with the places where it is exhibited, the materials that constitute it and the roles of spectator and creator.
Broodthaers was born in Brussels in 1924 and mainly focused on poetry until he was forty, when he began his practice in the visual arts. Over the course of the next twelve years, until his early death, his work retained a poetic quality and a sense of humor that balanced its conceptual framework.
Broodthaers is considered one of the most complex and multifaceted artistic figures of the 20th century. As one of the leading representatives of conceptual art, he critically explored not only the relationship between art, language, and communication but also the mechanisms, including the economic ones, that revolve around museums and the art system. He is therefore regarded as one of the fathers of the conceptual movement known as Institutional Critique. Broodthaers passed away in Cologne, Germany, in 1976.
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.
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville, in northern France, in 1887. Considered one of the most influential artists of 20th-century art, he is regarded as the father of Dadaism and Conceptual Art. He exhibited for the first time in 1909 at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
The artist, associated with the Parisian Dada group and surrealist artists, occasionally signed his works as Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego. A French national chess master, he lived between France and the United States until his permanent move to New York in 1942.
"Using painting, using art, to create a modus vivendi, a way of understanding life; that is, for the time being, of trying to make my life into a work of art itself, instead of spending my life creating works of art in the form of paintings or sculptures”, he declared in 1966.
Duchamp died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, in 1968.
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.
Richard Long was born in Bristol in 1945 and studied at the bluechip St. Martin's School in London. Since the late 1960s, his artistic practice has developed in direct relationship with natural and open environments. Associated with American Land Art, he departs from it for a more ephemeral and less invasive approach, in which he expresses the relationship with nature by inhabiting it, by cross through it with deep respect and an extreme economy of means and gestures.
Piero Manzoni (Italy, 1933 – 1963) was best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. He is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. Manzoni’s work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement in order to "tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values". His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism that was changing Italian society (the Italian economic miracle) after World War II.
A central figure in the American art scene of the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) was a pioneer of a radical approach to art that engaged with the urban context and its communities. His practice erased the boundaries between art, private life, and public space. Founder of the restaurant Food in Soho, which became a hub for the New York artistic community, Matta-Clark applied his architectural studies to create a collective called Anarchitecture. As the group's name suggests, his approach to architecture was anarchic and critical of the system, aiming to highlight the socio-economic contradictions underlying urban development.
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.
Santiago Sierra was born in 1966. He studied art in Madrid and then specialised in Hamburg, where he began producing installations from a minimalist and conceptual matrix. Defined black and white shapes realised with an extreme economy of means combine with a desire to stage actions that silently tear apart the veil of hypocrisy with which the capitalist West tries to hide its contradictions.
