Milan 20122
Italy
The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi celebrates the twentieth anniversary of its nomadic projects in Milan with a solo exhibition by Diego Marcon (b. 1985, Busto Arsizio) staged in Teatro Gerolamo, a nineteenth-century puppet theater known as La Piccola Scala [the small opera house] for its miniature dimensions and fine architectural details.
In the twenty years since the creation of this new model of mobile museum, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, under the leadership of President Beatrice Trussardi and Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni, has rediscovered and transformed vacant buildings, ancient churches, grand palazzos, forgotten spaces, and symbolic places of Milan, inviting artists to reinvent the city through their works and visions.
Over the last two decades, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has produced major exhibitions, public art projects, and special interventions by artists including Allora & Calzadilla, Darren Almond, Paweł Althamer, John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Elmgreen & Dragset, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Gelitin, Sarah Lucas, Ibrahim Mahama, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Anri Sala, Pipilotti Rist, Tino Sehgal, Stan VanDerBeek, and Nari Ward. Staged in venues across Milan including L’Arengario, San Carlo al Lazzaretto, Palazzo Citterio, Palazzo Cusani, Caselli Daziari di Porta Venezia, Albergo Diurno-Piazza Oberdan, Palazzo Litta, and Centro Balneare Romano, these projects have made some of the most beautiful and unusual spaces in the city accessible—often for the first time, and always free of charge. In addition to solo presentations, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has also produced and organized two major thematic exhibitions, The Great Mother at Palazzo Reale (2015) and The Restless Earth at La Triennale (2017).
To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents Dramoletti, the first institutional survey exhibition in Italy by Diego Marcon, one of the most interesting Italian artists of his generation. For this special presentation, the Foundation chose Teatro Gerolamo, a theater designed in the nineteenth century by Giuseppe Mengoni, the same architect behind the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi’s itinerant journey first began twenty years ago with Elmgreen & Dragset’s installation Short Cut (2003). Made famous by the puppet shows of the Fratelli Colla Company, rediscovered in the postwar years by Paolo Grassi and re- launched in the 1970s by Umberto Simonetta, the Teatro Gerolamo is saturated with the memories of the puppeteers’ enchanting fairy tales and stage designs, which find an eerie symmetry in the works of Diego Marcon.
With his films, videos, and installations, Marcon constructs mysterious chamber dramas inhabited by puppets, children, and creatures suspended between the human and the post-human. Blending melodrama and special effects, Marcon imagines a new humanity plagued by profound moral doubts and trapped endlessly in distressing and ever-repeating actions. Exhibited in this miniaturized theater, Marcon’s works spin around like toy dancers in a hypnotic music box, evoking the microworlds of Joseph Cornell, the fantasies of Carlo Collodi and Lewis Carroll, and the so-called “dramolettes” (in Italian, dramoletti) of Thomas Bernhard, from which the exhibition takes its title.
