The Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci presents Lorenza Longhi: Villa Delizia, the artist's first solo exhibition at an Italian institution. Longhi’s work explores the construction of desire and the circulation of objects in contemporary European and American societies. The exhibition continues Centro Pecci’s focus on Italian art, featuring prominent artists from international and national contexts.
Lorenza Longhi observes everyday life and exposes the ways in which objects are displayed and consumed through consumer goods, such as designer furniture, fabrics, and trimmings. Her works often play with ornament, kitsch, and glamour. They stage the codes of collective taste with the aim of revealing forms of desire while simultaneously rendering them ambiguous. This opens up a space for awareness.
In her practice, Longhi employs a DIY approach, juxtaposing found materials or using silk-screen printing without a matrix, applying stencils and salvaged fragments directly to the printing surface. She breathes new life into materials by incorporating errors, accidents, and unexpected variations into her artistic language. In this way, failure becomes a distancing from the rhetoric of efficiency.
Set up in the Ala Nio with the support of Cellerese, Villa Delizia transforms the exhibition space by intervening on certain architectural elements. Longhi reimagines the historic sofas of Centro Pecci and the circular ceiling windows. She also references some of the exhibition design solutions conceived by Formafantasma for the institution’s permanent collection. Trim work, seating, cushions, a portal, and window decals come together to create an enveloping space that reshapes the architecture to accommodate the artworks. This brings the exhibition design strategies to the forefront and highlights their role in shaping and guiding the public’s gaze.
For this exhibition, the artist created ten large canvases, each featuring fabrics selected and combined from manufacturers and companies in the Prato district, such as Cangioli 1859 and Tessilfibre. The artist embellished these fabrics with silkscreen prints and flock printing in collaboration with Floccatura Balmar. By removing the materials from their original function, the artist creates works of great formal refinement that reveal the underlying economic, symbolic, and cultural dynamics of contemporary production. Thus, recontextualization becomes a critical tool that reveals what normally remains invisible.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Mousse Publishing. In it, fashion historian and curator Marta Franceschini, curator Alice Motard, art historian Giorgio Motisi, and curator Michele Bertolino offer original essays reflecting on Longhi’s work and enriching the reader’s understanding. Titled Opera d’arte nella Villa Delizia, the publication was conceived by the artist as a catalog of the works on display.
