Sliding

Works from the Artistic Heritage of the Unipol GroupLarry Rivers | Beverly Pepper | Quayola | Stefano Ronci | fuse*

As part of its ongoing renewal process, Sliding – the exhibition project conceived by CUBO Unipol for the Group’s Milan headquarters – represents a reflection on the diversity, continuous evolution and multidisciplinary nature of contemporary artistic languages.
It is through the dialogue between works by artists from the Unipol Group’s Art Collection – spanning different historical periods and various techniques, materials and artistic languages – that Sliding aims to demonstrate not only the coexistence of different forms of expression within contemporary art, but even more so the tendency towards a blurring of boundaries between different artistic codes and forms which, in intertwining, give rise to new cross-fertilisation and new ways of perceiving and understanding reality. This dialogue is never definitive but is instead defined by constant shifts – the very shifts that inspire the project’s title, Sliding, and which echo the title of the parallel exhibition staged at Palazzo Fortuny and in the Granai delle Zitelle during the 1993 Venice Biennale, which was itself characterised by the fusion of the arts.

The project opened in 2025 with Beverly Pepper’s open, moving and reflective sculpture; the natural element inspired by traditional art-historical landscapes but reworked by Quayola using new technologies; the geographical and ironic reinterpretation of national identity by Larry Rivers; and the neon installation by Stefano Ronci, complemented, within CUBO’s digital box, by surreal illustrations which straddle the natural and digital worlds, the real and the artificial and truth and post-truth, by fuse. In 2026, the exhibition will be enriched by a dialogue between sculptures by Gigi Guadagnucci Germoglio (1985-1991) and by Beverly Pepper Virgo Rectangle Twist (1967), the latter work having returned to Milan following a meticulous restoration and the conclusion of the Beverly Pepper exhibition. Space outside , dedicated to the artist in the CUBO space in Bologna. While the minimalist and contemplative language of Gigi Guadagnucci’s marble sculpture invites the viewer to seek an intimate, inner dimension, Beverly Pepper’s mirrored surfaces, in amplifying the space surrounding the sculpture and drawing both the architecture and the viewer into a play of reflections that gradually blurs and dissolves the boundaries between the artwork and its context, open our gaze outwards. From September, Sliding is expanding its exhibition programme with the inclusion of two new works: Position (2015) by Mary Bauermeister and Straws (2020) by Francesca Pasquali. The blue straws of the latter invade the viewer’s space, reactivating the interactions with the public pioneered by the former in the 1970s through a practice that interwove visual arts, sound research and happenings. Their works, revisiting the themes of perception and the image – open to ever-new meanings and shifts in meaning – and of art as a means of rethinking the world and reality, not only renew the dialogue between the two artists and with fuse, which began in 2016 in the Flux-us exhibition held at CUBO in Bologna, but also expand and deepen the dialogue between the works already on display.

Sliding thus reaffirms its identity as a perceptual laboratory in which the artwork is never definitively situated but always in transit, always in a shifting relationship with the others.
In this state of ceaseless movement between past, present and future, the project aims to embody the spirit in which the Unipol Group’s artistic heritage was created: a living museum, in constant dialogue with time and reality.

Works currently on display
• Mary Bauermeister, Position’s (Farbrausch Series), 2015, tempera on canvas, 180h x 45 cm;

• fuse*, Artificial Botany – Unseen Flora, 2023, audio-video installation.

• Gigi Guadagnucci, Germoglio, 1985-1991, marble,162h x 58 x 47 cm;

• Francesca Pasquali, Straws, 2020, dark and light blue and green straws on a wooden panel with a blue lacquered metal frame, 90h x 70 x 25 cm;

• Beverly Pepper, Virgo Rectangle Twist, 1967, polished stainless steel, isofan colour, 241h x 135 x 69 cm;

• Quayola, PP_T011.A12 – 3D scans Series, 2016, print, 200h x 113 cm;

• Larry Rivers, Features of Italy/Map of Italy, 1961, mixed media on canvas mounted on board, 311h x 270 x 14.5 cm;

• Stefano Ronci, DiecialCUBO, 2022, blown neon on a mirrored surface, 160 x 160 cm.