What does it look like when almost 7,000 artworks, made by 6,930 artists from more than 40 countries, are curated by 47 people into one exhibition? It’s hard to describe. One would assume it would also be difficult to conceive of how a project like this could come together, but big, potentially unrealizable ideas seem to be the specialty of Luciano Benetton (of the Italian fashion brand known for its bright “united” colors and incendiary marketing campaigns), to whom the collection belongs and which he amassed in an astoundingly short eight years. The show, titled “Imago Mundi: Map of the New Art,” runs at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini through November 1.
The works are separated by country and almost all are sized at roughly four by five inches (the artists were given the restriction of working within this format, although not everyone stuck to it and certain countries appear to have been worse offenders than others—Germany, Austria, I’m looking at you). The walls are bare, while the pieces hang on purpose-built display walls, devised by Italian Postmodernist architect and designer Tobia Scarpa, that give the space a mazelike structure. But in this instance, there’s no single path.
It’s Scarpa’s design that keeps the exhibition from becoming chaotic, and is perhaps the key to what makes it successful. Finding the way along the rows of walls, moving from section to section as something catches your eye, a number of works, walls, and countries altogether are inevitably missed.
The aim, according to Benetton, is to turn things on their head in search of new approaches. How that manifests itself is an exhibition for which, upon leaving, the feeling of being completely overwhelmed outweighs any positive or negative responses to the art one has just seen. The list of artists alone takes up one entire wall, and the experience of absorbing everything at once is kind of like the schizophrenic barrage of an art fair, minus the market concerns.
With this much work, there’s a lot to see that’s good, and also a fair amount that is not. This is a particular type of freedom—there’s no way one could really look at or like everything. Coupled with the nonhierarchical collecting and display practices, it makes for a type of egalitarian experience rarely found in art viewing. You’ll find Korakrit Arunanondchai or Laurie Anderson hanging near a whole wall of artists from the United States, Algeria, or North Korea you’ve never heard of, and maybe even fall for one who sticks out to you among all the thousands. For me, it was a portrait-oriented piece with a bulbous mesh protrusion in navy and muted yellow by Chilean artist Matilde Benmayor Mancilla. The entire show—works as well as display—can purportedly be packed up and shipped with ease to any possible location. It’s a new model of exhibition display: frenetic, diplomatic, and perhaps even a little liberating because of these qualities.
A version of this article appears in the November 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
