The boundary between originality and imitation is very thin, especially in Roman culture with its insistence on the circulation of multiples as an homage to Greek art. This is the focus of the exhibition ‘Serial Classic’, co-curated by Salvatore Settis and Anna Anguissola, from May 9 to August 25 2015, on show at the new Fondazione Prada in Milan,Largo Isarco 2. In parallel the Fondazione remain active in Venice, where Fondazione Prada occupies an 18th-century palace in Ca’Corner della Regina, with the exhibition “Portable Classic”. Two exhibitions which take off at the same time, and combine ideally the two locations of the Fondazione during the summer of 2015. Exhibition projects, whose set up is designed by OMA, analyze respectively the themes of serialism and copy in the classical art and reproduction in small scale of Greco-Roman statuary from the Renaissance to Neoclassicism. 

“Serial Classic”focuses on classical sculpture and explores the ambivalent relationship between originality and imitation in Roman culture and its insistence on the circulation of multiples as an homage to Greek art. We tend to associate the idea of classical to that of uniqueness, but in no other period of western art history the creation of copies from great masterpieces of the past has been as important as in late Republican Rome and throughout the Imperial age. The exhibition comprises more than 70 artworks and opens with an in-depth analysis of lost originals and their multiple copies, represented by two particularly renowned series such as the ‘Discobolus’ and the ‘Crouching Venus’. Two other important sections are devoted to the materials and the colors of classical bronzes and marbles. The ‘Kassel Apollo’, for instance, is presented in two recent plaster casts which reproduce the original bronze surface of the lost Greek original and the colors of its Roman marble copies.

The Milanese exhibition underlines the vast activity of Fondazione Prada, created in 1993, in the organization of contemporary art exhibitions as well as architecture, cinema and philosophy projects. Different languages that coexist and complete each other to stimulate always new intellectual paths. The Milan space will also host three different exhibition projects: An Introduction, In Part and Trittico.

Serial Classic

Fondazione Prada, Milan
2, Largo Isarco

9 May – 25 August 2015

www.fondazioneprada.org