Opening: Friday 30 January, h 6:00 pm

Gallery Il Ponte continues its exhibition season with a solo show dedicated to Mauro Staccioli, an artist the gallery has supported for over thirty years and whose work is protected by the Mauro Staccioli Archive.

“A mark is all it takes to change a place; Mauro Staccioli’s sculpture, with its knack for interpreting its time and translating it into shapes that can talk to their observers, demonstrated this for almost fifty years.
His sculpture spanned the second half of the twentieth century, constantly adapting and renewing itself in the face of historical and cultural change, and never straying from his vision of sculpture as a critical tool.
…
In the 1970s, Staccioli’s work reflected a here and now scarred by tensions and divisions: iron and concrete barriers, symbolic and real walls – such as the famous Muro at the 1978 Venice Biennale – stamped their harsh, dramatic presence, representing the separation between spaces, classes and worldviews.
The 1980s saw a change in society and with it the way Staccioli related to history, space and the individual. Curved lines entered his sculptural lexicon as a sign of openness and movement, stepping past the rigidity of his earlier forms but not relinquishing their critical impetus. It was a conscious evolution, without abandoning previous principles by the wayside.
While Staccioli’s 1970s work has been the subject of numerous in-depth studies, to date there has been little investigation of his production that began to take shape in the 1980s. The exhibition presented by Galleria Il Ponte in Florence and reproposed in a reduced form at Arte Fiera Bologna 2026 focuses precisely on this segment of Staccioli’s research. The exhibition places the impressive environmental works installed between the 1980s and early 2000s in dialogue with a series of works whose “homely” dimensions make them no less rigorous or incisive. Indeed, these works allow a close look not only at the precision with which Staccioli measures the mark in space, but also at the continuity between his monumental research and small-scale experimentation. […]
(Caterina Martinelli, 2025)