There is a sort of gash on the façade of Palazzo Strozzi: it is the installation by JR, which proposes a reflection on the accessibility to places of culture in the era of Covid.
The new site specific work entitled 'La Ferita', 28 meters high and 33 meters wide, opens up to the vision of an interior that is both real and imagined at the same time.
Made with a black and white photographic collage typical of the artist's style, the work is built as an illusionistic game in which it seems to be able to look inside, seeing different rooms of Palazzo Strozzi: the colonnade of the courtyard, an imaginary exhibition room with Botticelli's paintings of Spring and the Birth of Venus, and a library.
The installation, it was explained, is part of Palazzo Strozzi Future Art, a new program, born from the collaboration with Andy Bianchedi in memory of Hillary Merkus Recordati, with the aim of creating a platform for the art of the present.
"It is a pleasure to be here - said JR today in Florence - this work awakens many things in all of us and what interests me is that everyone will interpret it based on their story, each one will have a different reading. A work of this kind. it remains for a few months, but its image will remain in people's heads in the future and I think that even when it is no longer there, the people who have seen it will go and see what is behind that wall ".
For Arturo Galansino, director of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation "in the current difficulty of offering opportunities for the enjoyment of art in traditional spaces, the choice of creating a work visible to anyone on the façade of Palazzo Strozzi becomes an invitation to rediscover a direct relationship with art and a solicitation for new forms of sharing and participation ".