Quaderni di Pittura_1: the winners of the Combat Prize 2025 Gallery Award on view at SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea

Opening: Saturday, February 14, 2026, h 18:00

Livorno. SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Quaderni di Pittura_1, an exhibition bringing together the works of Francesca Filicaia, Gemma Mazzotti, Nikko Mundacruz, and Marila Scartozzi, the four artists awarded the Gallery Prize as part of the 2025 Combat Prize.

The exhibition project builds on and further develops the dialogue initiated with the artists during the previous edition of the Combat Prize, opening a new phase of exchange and research between their individual practices and the exhibition space.

Exhibition invitation

Quaderni di Pittura_1 is the first chapter of a project conceived as an open series: not an exhibition understood as a final outcome, but a device intended to unfold over time as a space for observing, testing, and listening to contemporary painting. The reference to the idea of a “notebook” points to a processual dimension, made of notes, returns, and sedimentations, in which the image never becomes definitively fixed but remains open to the possibility of change.

Marila Scartozzi, Senza titolo, 2025, mixed technique on paper, 21 x 29 cm. Courtesy l'artista

In a present dominated by speed and the overproduction of images, painting today seems called upon to question its own self-evidence. Rather than producing recognizable figures, it becomes a space in which to slow down the gaze, make the duration of making perceptible, and challenge the transparency of the image and its immediate legibility. In this sense, the exhibition takes shape as a field of tension between memory and presence: memory understood as a silent reservoir of inner images and sedimented experiences; presence understood as the act of painting itself, made of gesture, layering, and the resistance of matter.

Francesca Filicaia, Sing me a song 'til I wake up again, 2024, oil on paper, 50 x 35 cm. Courtesy l'artista

Between these two poles operates the imagination, not as an escape from reality but as a device of transformation. Images are not simply remembered or observed: they are reconstructed, deformed, and recombined. Pictorial matter holds the time of the work within it and preserves its traces, resisting any definitive closure of the image.

Gemma Mazzotti, Dana in the sun, 2024, oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Courtesy l'artista

Within this shared horizon, the four artists’ practices unfold through distinct yet interrelated languages. Francesca Filicaia works with intimate and silent subjects—faces, objects, isolated figures—that slowly emerge from the background, keeping the image in a state of suspension. In Gemma Mazzotti, landscape becomes a perceptual field, built through a shifting balance between drawing and color, transparency and opacity. In Nikko Mundacruz, the image turns into an emotional and atmospheric space, conveying fragile presences marked by a constant tension between closeness and distance. Finally, in Marila Scartozzi, painting is crossed by a conflicted relationship with reality: figures surface from unstable layers, suspended between emergence and dissolution.

Nikko Mundacruz, There's Nothing Between Us, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 100 x 74 cm. Courtesy l'artista

In Quaderni di Pittura_1, painting does not present itself as a surface to be quickly deciphered, but as a space of duration and relation. The exhibition itself appears as an open notebook: a place where the image never fully coincides with itself, but remains unstable, available, and awaiting the gaze.

In dialogue with the exhibition, SAC presents two portrait-focused workshop sessions led by the exhibiting artists (20 February 2026, 9:30 a.m.; 27 February 2026, 10:00 a.m.). An extension of the project in the form of practice: the image as process, the portrait as a space of relation, the gesture as duration and threshold.

Quaderni di Pittura_1

14 February – 28 February 2026

SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea

Via L. Boccherini 22, 57124 Livorno (LI)

www.sac-spazioartecontemporanea.com

Info: info@premiocombat.it

Tel: +39 331 130 3702

Alessandro Moreschini. L’ornamento non è più un delitto

Until March 22, 2026, the Civic Museums of Ancient Art of the Civic Museums Department of the Municipality of Bologna host, in the galleries of the Civic Medieval Museum, L'ornamento non è più un delitto, a solo exhibition by Alessandro Moreschini, curated by Raffaele Quattrone and produced in collaboration with Ehiweb and Pasöt.

Alessandro Moreschini, Ora et labora, 2004, tempera acrilica su metallo, cm 198 x 154 x 7; 86 chiavi inglesi cm 16 x 3 x 0,4 cad. Bologna, MAMbo - Museo Arte Moderna Bologna

The exhibition project is part of the institutional program of ART CITY Bologna 2026 (5–8 February), the series of exhibitions, events, and initiatives promoted by the Municipality of Bologna in collaboration with BolognaFiere on the occasion of Arte Fiera.

L'ornamento non è più un crimine: with this statement, made by Renato Barilli in a 2020 text dedicated to Lily van der Stokker and Alessandro Moreschini, the itinerary of the artist’s new exhibition at the Civic Medieval Museum of Bologna opens. What began as a critical remark has now become the title and interpretive key of a project that rereads the decorative tradition as an ethical gesture, as a practice of care and attention toward the world.

For a long time Alessandro Moreschini (Castel San Pietro Terme, 1966) has chosen a secluded and rigorous path, far from the rhetoric of austere minimalism and the promises of hyper-technology: a path in which ornament is not an addition but a form of thought; not a mask, but a revelation. His worked surfaces—meticulous, vegetal, hyper-decorative textures—do not clothe objects: they transform them. They are breathing presences, silent microcosms capable of slipping into the interstices of the visible and restoring to everyday objects an unexpected energy, an inner vibration.

Already in the late 1990s, Barilli had identified Moreschini as an original voice on the Italian scene, including him in the historic group exhibition Officina Italia and recognizing in that young decorative rigor a radiating force, “a precious filing of iron.” Today, that intuition has reached full maturity in a body of work that has developed steadily, deepening the political and sensitive nature of ornament.

For ornament—long banished from the Western canon as superfluous or suspect—re-emerges here as a glocal language: attentive to non-hegemonic visual cultures, open to desire, spirituality, and the affective dimension of looking. It is an art that appears “weak,” because it rejects monumentalism, yet is in fact radical in its closeness, in its becoming a daily presence, in its reweaving of the ties between body, object, and world.

The encounter with the Civic Medieval Museum offers Moreschini an ideal terrain: a space made of stratifications, memories, votive objects, minute preciousness, miniatures, and gold—elements that for centuries have questioned our relationship with the sacred, the symbolic, and the evocative power of surfaces. The contemporary works slip among the historical artifacts without competing with them, instead establishing an osmotic, at times secret, dialogue in which light, color, and decorative rhythm become bridges between different epochs and sensibilities.

The exhibition itinerary—spread across several rooms of the museum—welcomes interventions conceived as integrative, not invasive presences: works that grow like a visual ivy over the architecture and objects of the past, forging unexpected connections. The artist does not impose a new museum; he reveals an inner, emotional one, made of decorative whispers, luminous shivers, and details that invite viewers to slow down, to look closely, and to rediscover the time of observation.

Alessandro Moreschini. L'ornamento non è più un delitto, Veduta di allestimento, Bologna, Museo Civico Medievale, 2026. Courtesy Settore Musei Civici Bologna | Musei Civici d'Arte Antica

“I conceived the exhibition design as an act of listening. Alessandro Moreschini’s works were not meant to impose themselves on the Medieval Museum, nor to camouflage themselves within it: they were meant to resonate. For this reason, I chose a path that allows the works to slip among the historical objects like living presences, capable of creating subtle, almost secret connections without interrupting the continuity of the place. Ornament thus becomes a bridge between epochs, an act of care that restores to the museum its dimension as a lived space. I wanted the visitor to perceive the encounter—not the overlap—between past and present: a low-voiced dialogue made of details, reflections, and vibrations. An installation that does not add, but reveals,” explains curator Raffaele Quattrone.

In a present characterized by rapid visual consumption and an increasing delegation of imagination to automated technologies, Moreschini’s project stands as an act of resistance: an invitation to return to manual labor, to gesture, to the slow gestation of surfaces; to recognize in ornament not an escape, but a responsibility toward what surrounds us.

Renato Barilli writes: “I have intervened several times on the work of Alessandro Moreschini, entirely singular, as this exhibition confirms, where two levels can be discerned: there are precious collectible objects, but as if that were not enough, a rain of refined fragments descends over everything, further enhancing the overall preciousness.”

L'ornamento non è più un delitto thus becomes a poetic, political, and anthropological statement: the recovery of a language that can be intimate and universal, humble and complex, ancient and contemporary. A language that inhabits, that grows, that becomes a place. That becomes, precisely, a secret museum.

Alessandro Moreschini. L’ornamento non è più un delitto

A cura di Raffaele Quattrone

Con un testo di Renato Barilli

17 gennaio 2026 – 22 marzo 2026

Museo Civico Medievale, Via Alessandro Manzoni 4 | 40121 Bologna

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection celebrates the centenary of Cahiers d’Art in the galleries of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni

On the occasion of the centenary of the French magazine Cahiers d’Art, founded in 1926 by art historian Christian Zervos, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the international programme of celebrations with a special installation dedicated to the renowned publication, presented within the galleries of the permanent collection.

Carhiers d'Art © Collezione Peggy Guggenheim. Ph. Arianna Ferraretto

A selection of ten issues of the historic magazine, spanning the 1920s to the 1950s, enters into dialogue with iconic works from the museum’s collection, highlighting the central role that Cahiers d’Art played in shaping modernist visual culture and in the critical and cultural debate that animated twentieth-century Europe.

Founded in Paris as a magazine, publishing house, and gallery, Cahiers d’Art became an experimental laboratory in which artists, writers, and intellectuals helped define a new aesthetic and theoretical language. Its pages featured Alexander Calder, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Vasily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, and Pablo Picasso, alongside poets and thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Lacan, and Tristan Tzara. The exceptional quality of its reproductions—entrusted to photographers including Dora Maar and Man Ray—made the magazine a true “portable museum,” capable of canonizing the avant-garde while it was still in the making.

The refined and carefully curated selection presented in Venice—acquired for the occasion by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection through a fundraising campaign and now part of the museum’s archival holdings—documents a significant historical connection between Cahiers d’Art and the Collection itself. The ten issues on view in the galleries of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni reproduce works that are part of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, and in 1955 Guggenheim herself contributed to the magazine with a text on Constantin Brancusi, once again attesting to her active engagement with the international art scene.

“Cahiers d’Art made the avant-garde visible as it was taking shape,” says Karole P. B. Vail, Director of the museum. “This ability to anticipate the new is something we share. Peggy Guggenheim was among the leading figures of that same cultural landscape, and we like to think of the Collection as a place where that spirit of experimentation continues to be cultivated and shared.”

With this initiative, the museum renews its mission to celebrate modernity through its most innovative expressions, recognizing Cahiers d’Art not only as a witness to its time, but as an active agent in the construction of modernism and its contemporary legacy.

Cahiers d'Art © Collezione Peggy Guggenheim. Ph. Arianna Ferraretto

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the first institution to inaugurate a cycle of exhibitions marking the centenary, which throughout 2026 will involve a network of international museums, including MDAM – Collection Zervos, Vézelay; LUMA Arles; the Musée national Picasso–Paris; the Benaki Museum, Athens; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. The global programme, with curatorial participation by Daniel Birnbaum, also includes a celebratory publication, Cahiers d’Art. A Century of Modernism, a series of conversations, and a programme of exhibitions at the magazine’s Paris headquarters.

Since its founding in 1926, Cahiers d’Art has published 97 issues and more than 50 volumes, including the seminal Picasso Catalogue Raisonné. Relaunched in 2012 by Swedish collector Staffan Ahrenberg, it continues to serve as a platform for dialogue between generations of artists, bringing together historic figures such as Calder and Picasso with contemporary voices including Arthur Jafa, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gabriel Orozco, and Rosemarie Trockel.