ART NEWS

ROME'S MAXXI PREPARES TO OPEN ART MUSEUM IN L'AQUILA MAXXI L'Aquila, a new contemporary art museum under the management of Rome's Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, is set to open in the Abruzzo capital L'Aquila on 5 October. The museum will be housed at the Palazzo Ardinghelli whose restoration, financed by Russia, is nearing completion following L'Aquila's devastating earthquake in April 2009. The project, stalled by the covid-19 emergency, has seen the complete renovation of the 18th-century baroque building which was formerly the home of culture ministry offices. On 21 July the culture ministry entrusted the museum to MAXXI whose president Giovanna Melandri says the reopening of Palazzo Ardinghelli will be symbolic of a "double rebirth", after the devastation of the earthquake and the “suspension of time” caused by the coronavirus lockdown. MAXXI describes the project as offering the community "a new collective place, a platform of cultural creativity, open, shared, at the service of the relaunch of the city." On 5 September the museum will be presented to the media followed by guided tours for the public from 15.00-19.00 on 5 September and 11.00-13.30 on 6 September. The tours will be led by students of the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila, in compliance with safety regulations, with reservations required (via website www.maxxilaquila.art). MAXXI L'Aquila will be inaugurated on 30 October, in the presence of Italy's culture minister Dario Franceschini and Russian ambassador Sergey Razov. The museum's exhibitions will include works by Elisabetta Benassi, Daniela De Lorenzo, Alberto Garutti, Nunzio, Ettore Spalletti, Anastasia Potemkina, Paolo Pellegrin and Stefano Cerio, in addition to a selection of works from the MAXXI Collection. ROME'S MUSJA ART MUSEUM CLOSES AFTER JUST ONE YEAR Musja, a privately-owned museum dedicated to contemporary art, has closed down exactly a year after it opened its doors on a side street near Campo de' Fiori in central Rome. The news was broken by Ovidio Maria Jacorossi, the son of the museum's founder of the same name who died aged 85 last October. "It is with great regret", he wrote, "that we find ourselves forced to communicate the closure of Musja, a museum born just under a year ago with the aim of sharing, with the whole community, the vast collection of the late founder Ovidio Jacorossi and to contribute to the artistic and cultural panorama of Rome and Italy with a programme of international scope, sensitive to the most innovative trends in contemporary art." The viability of the museum had become compromised by the covid-19 emergency and the subsequent restrictions that would not have "allowed the museum to reopen its doors," said Jacorossi, who pointed to the incompatibility of the building's narrow spaces with social distancing. The Artribune highlights the positive results obtained by the museum on Via de' Chiavari which saw the restoration of a set of interconnected spaces that grew out of the ancient ruins of Pompey's Theatre, including a glass corridor passing through a courtyard attributed to the 16th-century architect Baldassarre Peruzzi. The museum also had success with its first and only exhibition – The Dark Side: Who is afraid of the dark? – which welcomed 10,000 visitors. Describing the museum's closure as a "light going out," Jacorossi Junior says his wish is that "this darkness will soon disappear and that art can return as soon as possible to play its role as light and guide."