Sliding

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

The exhibition project SLIDING continues its path of transformation and reflection on interdisciplinarity and the ongoing evolution of artistic languages. Following its inauguration with works by Beverly Pepper, Quayola, Larry Rivers, Stefano Ronci and fuse*, the exhibition experienced a first significant slide with the introduction of Germoglio (1981–1985) by Gigi Guadagnucci, which temporarily replaced Virgo Rectangle Twist (1967) by Beverly Pepper. Now—enhanced by a restoration that has renewed its material and perceptual presence and following the conclusion of the exhibition Beverly Pepper. Space Outside at CUBO’s Bologna venues—Virgo Rectangle Twist returns to Milan.

Virgo Rectangle Twist embodies Pepper’s inclusive and public monumentality: its mirror-polished steel captures and multiplies the surrounding space, engaging architecture and viewer in a play of reflections that dissolves the boundaries between artwork and context. Germoglio, by contrast, presents itself with intimate, meditative essentiality. Guadagnucci works with organic form, vegetal emergence, and matter as a metaphor for growth and silent becoming. Where Pepper reflects and multiplies, Guadagnucci absorbs and concentrates; where the former expands the gaze outward, the latter draws it inward toward an interior core.

The simultaneous presence of works by Pepper and Guadagnucci alongside those of Quayola, Larry Rivers, Stefano Ronci and fuse* generates a field of productive tensions in which monumentality and intimacy, reflective surfaces and material absorption, geometry and organic form question and respond to one another.

The works from the Unipol Group’s artistic heritage on display—diverse in style, technique and historical period, from the 1960s to the present—range from sculpture to multimedia installation, engaging in dialogue through a shared drive toward innovation. Yet this dialogue is never fixed: it changes with every “slide,” with each substitution or return, with every new constellation formed among the works. The title itself—borrowed from a section of the 1993 Venice Biennale in which both Larry Rivers and Beverly Pepper participated—evokes the idea of movement and slippage between artistic languages, underscoring the intention to move beyond the mere coexistence of the arts toward cross-pollination and new perceptual modes.

SLIDING thus reaffirms its identity as a perceptual laboratory in which no work is ever definitively placed, but always in transit, always in shifting relation to the others.

In this constant movement between past, present and future, SLIDING fully embodies the spirit with which the Unipol Group’s artistic heritage was conceived: a living museum, in continuous dialogue with time and reality.

Works currently on view

• Features of Italy (1961), by Larry Rivers: a geographical representation of national identity reinterpreted with irony.
• Virgo, rectangle twist (1967), by Beverly Pepper: the static nature of sculpture becomes dynamic torsion, as the strength of matter engages in dialogue with the lightness of movement.
• Germoglio (1985–1991), by Gigi Guadagnucci: a marble sculpture that renews tradition with an essential and contemplative language, in dialogue with nature and space.
• PP_T011.A12 – 3D Scans Series (2016), by Quayola: a shift between the physical and the digital, where traditional forms of art are reinterpreted through technology.
• DiecialCUBO (2022), by Stefano Ronci: combines and integrates languages, materials, and forms of contemporaneity, exploring the relationship between space, artwork, and viewer.
• Artificial Botany – Unseen Flora (2023), by fuse*: surreal illustrations that represent an intersection between the natural and digital worlds, the real and the artificial, truth and post-truth.