FLORENCE - Thirty installations, including horned iguanas, a red tiger crouched in the Niobe room, unpublished versions of the Medusa with pointed fangs and beaks: these are the fantastic creatures that populate the Uffizi in 'Seduction', an exhibition by the Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen, set up in the Gallery of statues and paintings from January 18 to March 20.
The creatures, explains the Florentine museum, are scattered among the gallery's masterpieces and their visual and conceptual impact will accompany visitors.
Vanmechelen, painter, sculptor, performer, focuses his research on the concepts of hybridization and contamination. The works, all specifically created for the Uffizi spaces, focus on the primordial and antithetical concepts that have always nourished the human imagination: life-death, human-divine, earthly-spiritual, natural-artificial. Arranged in dialogue with the works of the collection, they constitute a journey around the idea of 'seduction'. For the artist "at this moment, in the Anthropocene, we need a new global renaissance. We need a cosmopolitan renaissance. This new narrative must be based on an understanding of the interconnectedness of all living beings. The parallel with the Renaissance. Italian is clear. Art, being conceived for the future,it is the means to favor and project new narratives in the world. Art has always been the connective tissue of human existence ".
