curated by Marco Bazzini

1 November 2008 - 11 January 2009

CID /Visual Arts Exhibition Rooms
open every day 10 am - 7 pm, closed on Tuesdays
Free admission

Twenty years after Scultura Prato, which in the meantime has become one of the distinctive icons of the city, the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art presents an exhibition of original works by Mauro Staccioli, an internationally renowned Tuscan artist, which will also be the first to feature his combined planning work.

The event itself is part of "Territoria # 3. The place of the contemporary", a multifaceted network project on contemporary culture sponsored by the Province of Prato with the contribution of the Tuscany Region

As the title "thinking sculpture" stresses, the exhibition will focus on the preparatory drawings, sketches and models produced by the artist for the "large constructed signs" which he has created over forty years in many part of the world, from Italy to Korea and from the United States to Israel.
Staccioli began expressing his own ambient perception of sculptural work in the late 'Sixties, and it involves interaction with the actual space that the individual works are intended and created for. Staccioli believes that sculpting is the result of the encounter and dialogue between the sculpture and the setting; in his own words "creating a sculpture means existing in a place".
Before building anything, a lot of extensive planning at architectural level goes into experimenting with the impression within the mental space of the imagination.
"Planning an idea - the artist states - involves research by imagery. A drawing is firstly an idea, it is the image of something that must become: the sculpture, the physical object".
Exploring these "places of thought" with all their variants and hypotheses some of which are never brought to completion in the sculpture that finally "gets built" just as imagining its full-scale collocation in situ, opens a new dimension on the complexity of relations that the mere form that characterises all the artist's productions has with the environment.

Corraini, a publishing house in Mantova will print a special monograph for this exhibition of every project actually created by the artist with critical reviews by Luca Massimo Barbero, Marco Bazzini and an introduction by Gillo Dorfles.