In 2022, the retrospective of Christian Frosi, the solo show of Dora Budor, the installation by Anri Sala in Palazzo della Ragione along with the group show Dancing Plague and the new display of The Impermanent Collection. Meanwhile, Radio GAMeC celebrates thirty years of the Gallery.

In 2023, the solo shows by Vivian Suter and Rachel Whiteread along with the third major chapter of The Trilogy of Matter, which will investigation the theme of dematerialization. Radio GAMeC becomes ‘Capital’.

The dematerialization of processes, the conservation of memories and the ecological turn will be the three main topics investigated by the GAMeC in the next two years of program, under the direction of Lorenzo Giusti.

After an intense year that has seen the Gallery feature the works of Regina Cassolo Bracchi, Ernesto Neto, Daiga Grantina and the exhibition Nothing is Lost. Art and Matter in Transformation, the new GAMeC exhibition season will open in March with the third appointment of the cycle The Impermanent Collection.
At the same time, Spazio Zero will host the exhibition Dancing Plague: the winning project of the eleventh edition of the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize. In June, a retrospective will be held to narrate the production of Christian Frosi, an artist who for over ten years chose to leave the public scene, while the Sala delle Capriate in Palazzo della Ragione—the museum’s summer venue—comes alive with Time No Longer: an immersive project by Anri Sala. The year ends in October with the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum by Croatian-born artist Dora Budor.

2023, the year in which Bergamo and Brescia will be the Italian capitals of culture, will open for GAMeC in February with the third and last chapter of The Trilogy of Matter, dedicated to the theme of dematerialization in the dimensions of void and flow. The first solo exhibition in an Italian museum of the artist Vivian Suter and the site-specific intervention by Rachel Whiteread for Palazzo della Ragione are already in the pipeline.

Finally, in both 2022 and 2023, great space will be given over to Radio GAMeC, the digital project based on the Gallery’s social channels during the 2020 pandemic emergency, which has evolved into a permanent experimental media platform dedicated to the growing of new communities through debate on current affairs.

“The trans-pandemic phase we are going through,” says Lorenzo Giusti, Director of GAMeC, “and the selection of Bergamo and Brescia as Italian capitals of culture in 2023, have pushed us to frame the projects and activities of the next two years within a single perspective of meaning. A long period in which, through art and words, we will bring attention to some of the great issues of our time—the preservation of memories and data, the dematerialization of processes, and the ecological turn—always keeping faith with the historical, horizontal projection that GAMeC has adopted in its projects at the turn of the twenty-first century, and without forgetting the attention to the scope for consolation and care that shared art and culture can provide.”

“For the year in which Bergamo, together with Brescia, will be in the spotlight as the Italian Capital of Culture, the GAMeC has prepared a program full of initiatives, anticipating to 2022 a project open to the international dimension, focusing on some of the most innovative artistic phenomena, experimentation and reflection on several of the key themes of modern times,” continues Alberto Barcella, President of GAMeC. “Its mission is now to propose arenas for knowledge and discussion, capable of involving a sensitive and curious audience, especially among the younger generations.”

“The GAMeC program,” concludes the Councilor for Culture of the City of Bergamo, Nadia Ghisalberti, “offers an initial glimpse at the activities in store for 2023: the great exhibition on dematerialization in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries, which anticipated some profound changes to be felt in our present era, is part of the theme of innovation, while the presence of Vivian Suter and Rachel Whiteread, two of the best-known artists around, underlines the GAMeC’s international vocation, one which has promoted Bergamo as a new point of attraction on the contemporary art scene. Moreover, in the wake of the public success achieved last year, Radio GAMeC will constitute a privileged channel of communication for the Gallery, capable of reaching out to a variety of audiences, from those online to in-person visitors, thus activating dialogue and triggering participatory confrontation on the most topical of issues, at the very heart of the development foreseen for the city as Italian Capital of Culture.”

PROGRAM

March – December 2022
RADIO GAMeC 30
To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the GAMeC, opened to the public for the first time in November 1991, Radio GAMeC will retrace the history of art over the last thirty years, identifying a representative element for each year passed —from 1991 to 2021—(an exhibition, a work of art, a publication, an event), and producing as many podcasts arising from a series of conversations with international guests and distributed through various podcast platforms.

March 11, 2022 – January 8, 2023
THE IMPERMANENT COLLECTION #3
The Impermanent Collection is a research, exhibition, and workshop platform that, since 2018, has highlighted the hybrid nature of the GAMeC collection, reflecting its dynamic character. Following the first chapter of the series—which told the story of the museum’s collections—and the second—which placed the collection in dialogue with a nucleus of works confiscated around Lombardy and handed over to the Gallery—the third exhibition of the cycle, conceived as an active display, marks the celebrations dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the GAMeC by providing the public with a rich selection of works from the museum’s heritage, created by artists from various generations, from the 1990s up to the present day.
Curators: Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni, Angela Fabrizia Previtali

March 11 – May 29, 2022
DANCING PLAGUE
The Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize is the first international competition dedicated to young curators (under 30), drawing on the desire to remember Lorenzo Bonaldi’s passion for art and collecting. In March 2022 the exhibition Dancing Plague will open in Spazio Zero, the winning project of the 11th edition, awarded for its imaginative character. Starting from the historical episode of the ‘dancing plague’, the project creates a dialogue between post-medieval European history, the issues of colonialism, and the pandemic experience. The project orchestrates various media and experiences, reflecting on dance, body, and disease from an original perspective, through the works of Benni Bosetto, Ufuoma Essi, Klaus Jürgen Schmidt, Lito Kattou, Petros Moris, Eva Papamargariti, Konstantinos Papanikolaou, Mathilde Rosier, Michael Scerbo, and Elisa Zuppini.
Curator: Panos Giannikopoulos

June 10 – September 25, 2022
CHRISTIAN FROSI
One of the most widely appreciated Italian artists of his generation, Christian Frosi (1974) has made transience the constant element of his artistic production. His works, created over little more than ten years, take the form of evanescent clouds of foam or clotheslines suspended in mid-air, hula-hoops balanced on pyramids of sand or approximate reconstructions of levitation experiments. Since 2012, the artist himself has chosen evanescence and invisibility, deciding to remove himself from the art world. Ten years after his departure from the scene, GAMeC dedicates a retrospective exhibition to him, to look back over his production and contextualize it, with the aim of preserving his history and avoiding his work being defined exclusively by the exceptionality of his silence.
Curator: Nicola Ricciardi

June 10 – October 16, 2022
ANRI SALA
For the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, the Albanian-born artist Anri Sala (1974) conceives a contextualized re-adaptation of his last major production: Time No Longer. The computer-generated imagery installation will bring visitors into contact with the enlarged image of a record player floating in a space station, playing a new arrangement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time for clarinet and saxophone. Its notes spreading through the room in conjunction with flashes of light that follow the rhythm of the music will reveal the architectural lines and frescoes contained in the ancient hall, thus extending to the origins of local public history the bridge between past and present, between memory and projection into the future.
Curators: Lorenzo Giusti, Sara Fumagalli

October 13, 2022 – January 8, 2023
DORA BUDOR
For her first solo exhibition in an Italian museum, the Croatian-born artist Dora Budor (1984) will create a project conceived in close relationship with the spatial qualities of Spazio Zero, in which characteristics of the given context are amplified, dislodged, or re-circuited. Conceived as a continuation of the artist’s exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2022), a number of works in the show will concern architecture as a tectonic, infrastructural, and gendered system.
Curators: Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni

January – December 2023
RADIO GAMeC CAPITAL
In the year that Bergamo and Brescia become the Italian capitals of culture, Radio GAMeC will give life to a rich schedule of investigations and in-depth studies dedicated to the most urgent issues of contemporaneity, with particular attention to the theme of the ecological turn and the reconversion of processes. Thanks to a recording studio inside the museum and to a new mobile device to reach different points of the vast territory of the two provinces, Radio GAMeC Capital will broadcast regularly dealing with the key themes of the present and opening up cultural experience to public participation. A genuine thematic channel made available to the local community, visitors, and digital users alike, capable of involving heterogeneous and distant audiences.

February – May 2023
THE TRILOGY OF MATTER
The third and final major exhibition of the cycle started in 2018 with Black Hole and following in 2021 with Nothing is Lost, after having recounted the specific interest of some artists for the depths of matter and advancing a reflection on the transformative dimension of the Whole, will explore the theme of dematerialization by connecting the research on the void initiated by the early movements of the historical avant-garde with the investigations on flow, begun in the years of early computerization and continued through the post-digital era via the use of new languages and simulated realities. Occupying all the spaces of the museum and with a part developed exclusively online, the exhibition will host some of the great protagonists of the history of art together with artists from the most recent generations.
Curators: Lorenzo Giusti, Domenico Quaranta

June – October 2023
VIVIAN SUTER
The works of the Argentinian-born artist Vivian Suter (1949) tell of the intimate bond that keeps them linked to the vital forces of the environment from which they originate. After moving to Guatemala at the age of thirty-five, since 2005, when most of her works were submerged during the passage of Hurricane Stan, the artist has further opened her research to the infinite possibilities of chance, accepting metamorphosis as an essential element of art and painting. The exhibition, the first ever by the artist staged in an Italian museum, will bring together a significant series of Vivian Suter’s canvases, created over various phases of her career.
Curator: Lorenzo Giusti

June – October 2023
RACHEL WHITEREAD
One of the most celebrated English artists of her generation, Rachel Whiteread (1963) reflects on the memory of places, investigating the relationship between empty and full, between past and present, creating sculptures akin to architecture that can reach very large dimensions. For the exhibition at Palazzo della Ragione, the artist will create a group of new works inspired by the architectural context, thus creating a new bond between past and present, between material history and the modern-day culture of form.
Curators: Lorenzo Giusti, Sara Fumagalli