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The Expanded Space: Artistic Journeys in the 1980s
curated by Paolo Bolpagni and Francesca Pola
14 November 2026 – 10 January 2027
LUCCA
Fondazione Ragghianti, San Micheletto Complex, Via San Micheletto, 3Church of Sant’Alessandro Maggiore, Piazza Sant’Alessandro, 3
Cloister of Santa Caterina at the Real Collegio, Via della Cavallerizza
OUTDOOR VE NUE- ALAWAYS FREE TO ACCESS
Church of Santa Maria dei Servi
Passaggio delle Carrozze at the Palazzo Ducale
| Opening hours: | From 14 November to 27 December, Thursday to Sunday, 10.00–18.00 From 28 December to 10 January, every day, 10.00–18.00 Special opening on 8 December; closed on 25 December |
Admission ticket: | Admission ticket: 7 euro Discount ticket (4 euro) for: • residents in the province of Lucca • Complesso Museale e Archeologico della Cattedrale di Lucca ticket holders • visitors to the Photolux Festival exhibition • FAI and Touring Club members • Artsupp Card holders • groups of more than 15 • visitors under 18 years • college students, students enrolled in art schools and conservatories with school ID. Admission free for: • children under 6 years • visitors with disabilities (as well as those accompanying them) • one person accompanying per group • Tuscan university students with university ID • school groups (primary, middle, and secondaty school) • teachers • ICOM members • reporters and tourist-guides with professional ID • members of the military with military ID. |
| Info: | info@fondazioneragghianti.it T. 0583 467205 |
Were the 1980s really the era of a return to figurative painting, following the dematerialisation of the object characteristic of Conceptual art and the triumph of performance art and happenings? And are they therefore destined to go down in history as the era of the Italian Transavantgarde, German Neo-Expressionism, American-style graffiti, Neo-Pop and the postmodernist wave? Yes, they were all that, but not only that. It is precisely to the other side of the 1980s – characterised by abstract experimentation, geometry, repetitive marks and monochrome – that the Fondazione Ragghianti and the Fondazione Centro delle Arti Lucca are dedicating this exhibition, which, starting from the rooms of the San Micheletto Complex, extends to various historic sites across the city. From the first cloister of San Micheletto itself, where a neon installation by François Morellet is on display, to the church of Santa Maria dei Servi, where David Tremlett has designed an intervention – at once discreet and spectacular – on the four neo-Gothic mullioned windows of the building’s northern wall; from the medieval Sant’Alessandro Maggiore, which houses works by Dadamaino, Gianni Asdrubali and Michel Verjux, to the Cloister of Santa Caterina at the Real Collegio, featuring a sculpture by Grazia Varisco from 1984 and Gianni Colombo’s large-scale Architettura cacogoniometrica (1981); and finally to the Palazzo Ducale, in the Passaggio delle Carrozze, for which Felice Varini has created an exceptional work specifically for the occasion.
The twenty-six selected artists, from different generations, proposed, in the 1980s, a different way of making art, linked to geometry, to non-figurative choices, to a dialogue with the environmental dimension, and to a reaching out towards space (an ‘extended space’, in fact). It is precisely in this alternative ‘abstract’ approach – though not merely that – that lies the rationale which has guided, without any claim to exhaustiveness, the selection of the artists featured in the exhibition, across the galleries of the Fondazione Ragghianti and other venues throughout the city of Lucca. In addition to those by the artists already mentioned, works by Carla Accardi, Rodolfo Aricò, Enrico Castellani, Alan Charlton, Carlo Ciussi, Piero Dorazio, Wolfgang Laib, Mario Nigro, Achille Perilli, Pino Pinelli, Bruno Querci, Fred Sandback, Angelo Savelli, Nelio Sonego, Ettore Spalletti, Niele Toroni, Günter Umberg and Elisabeth Vary are on display.