Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento Rovereto, Rovereto

It is a sort of “encyclopedic space” that brings together in a single architectural complex an Art Museum, a 20th Century Archive, a specialized Library, an Auditorium. This is how the new headquarters of the Mart in Rovereto presents itself, designed by a famous Ticinese architect, Mario Botta, in collaboration with an appreciated Trentino engineer, Giulio Andreolli. Since the day of its inauguration, which took place on December 15, 2002, the Rovereto cultural center has become a national and international point of reference in the field of research, conservation, and enhancement of the figurative arts of the contemporary age, from Romanticism to the present day. The history of the Mart, however, began fifteen years earlier, in 1987, with the establishment of a provincial Museum, destined to house – in the central headquarters of Palazzo Albere in Trento, in the ’900 Archive, and in the Depero House-Museum in Rovereto – the collections of modern and contemporary art acquired in the last two centuries by the municipalities of Trento, Rovereto, and the Autonomous Province, as well as the important bequest of works and documents by Fortunato Depero (Fondo, 1892 – Rovereto, 1960), one of the protagonists of the Futurist movement. Since spring 1998, the prestigious collection of Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi, with masterpieces of 20th-century Italian painting – including 21 paintings by Giorgio Morandi – signed by Carlo Carrà, Mario Sironi, Massimo Campigli, Filippo De Pisis, and Osvaldo Licini, has been preserved at the Mart. At the VAF Foundation in Frankfurt belong, instead, significant works by Carrà, De Chirico, and Casorati, also deposited there. In the permanent exhibition path, post-war artistic movements are present, from abstractionism to the experiences of the Sixties and Seventies (arte povera, minimal art, conceptual, transavantgarde), from late 20th-century art to the very recent innovations of the early 21st century.

Distinctive elements of the Mart are, finally, the 20th Century Archive – where important documentary collections of artists, such as Depero, Severini, and Carrà, architects (Mazzoni, Baldessari, Sottsass, Gigiotti Zanini) and art critics like Carlo Belli and Silvio Branzi, have merged – and the Library, which holds about 60,000 volumes, including exhibition catalogs, artist biographies, dictionaries, and other types of books.