La Ca’ La Ghironda Foundation is a cultural center, the result of a ten-year intervention that saw the architectural and environmental renovation of a farmstead in Ponte Ronca di Zola Predosa. The institution is affiliated with the local Municipal Administration for the purpose of conducting guided tours and other cultural and artistic events. In the open-air museum area in the park, which extends for 10 hectares and where fifteen thousand plants of local or naturalized species and some exotic ones have been planted, about two hundred and ten sculptural works by one hundred and ten Italian and foreign artists are distributed, including Cesar, Messina, Manzù, Ceroli, Cascella, Mastronunzio, Ghermandi, Yasuda, Mastroianni, Benetton Minguzzi, Monari, Stahler and Zorio.
Ca’ la Ghironda was born from the will of the collector and artist Francesco Martani, who primarily desired to combine the natural balance of the farmstead with the artistic balance of outdoor sculpture, placed on the slopes of the Ponte Ronca park, with the exhibition of his collection of works from the twentieth century and contemporary times, housed in the building next to the manor house, designed by Renzo Piano. The sculptures are by artists active in the second half of the twentieth century, both nationally and internationally, with a significant presence of sculptors from the Emilia Romagna region. The selection includes the formal solutions expressed by sculpture in recent decades: figuration, abstraction, and conceptuality are documented with works that express the different stylistic nuances of the authors within the expressiveness of the visual language.
Italian sculpture is represented by works by Virgilio Guidi, Giuliano Vangi, Luigi Mainolfi, Fausto Melotti, Giuseppe Uncini, Giacomo Manzù, Aldo Mondino, Pietro Cascella, Leonardo Santoli, Pietro Consagra, Toni Benetton, Mario Ceroli, Nunzio, Giò Pomodoro, Giuseppe Maraniello and Augusto Perez, Gilberto Zorio; international contributions include Arman, Nag Arnoldi, Cesar, Igor Mitoraj, Daniel Couvreur, Jacques Basler, Josè Carlos Balanza, Pavel Bukur, Anna Chormy, Tadeus Koper, Charlotte Morman. Particular attention has been given to the evolution of poetic languages of Emilia-Romagna origin, including Mario Nanni, Sergio Zanni, Luciano Minguzzi, Carlo Zauli, Quinto Ghermandi, Ettore Colla, Angelo Biancini, Adriano Avanzolini, Luca Caccioni and Francesco Martani.
A lively cultural center, recognized by public entities that collaborate and support its initiatives, the Ca’ la Ghironda Foundation has, over time, expanded the exhibition structure adapting it to the needs of the expanding collection of its founder, who gathered works by modern artists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and artists of the twentieth century and contemporary times; and provided a space dedicated to hosting and promoting temporary exhibitions by artists not yet widely recognized. From 1959 to today, hundreds of painting and sculpture works have been acquired by Francesco Martani including works by Francis Bacon, Giacomo Manzù, Max Bill, Massimo Campigli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla, Giorgio de Chirico, Fortunato Depero, Giuliano Vangi, Fernandez Arman, Virgilio Guidi, Giuseppe Uncini, Lucio Fontana, Willem de Köoning, Graham Sutherland, Giulio Turcato, Renato Guttuso, Toti Scialoja, Paul Jenkins, Mario Schifano, Piero Manai, Fausto Melotti, Giuseppe Maraniello, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Umberto Mastroianni, Giorgio Morandi, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Joan Mirò and Marc Chagall. In 2005, the Foundation increased the number of works further enriching the twentieth-century section.
In addition to the activities as an artist and collector, Martani also serves as organizer and creator, together with Giorgio Celli (deceased in 2011) and Giuseppe Cordoni, of Arte & città, an event that annually hosts authors of every discipline and nationality. Regarding the painting section of the twelfth edition, the works were installed, as usual, at the former Church of Sant’Apollinare in San Giovanni in Persiceto, while the sculptural works by Anna Chromy, Cinzia Rossi Ghion, Harry Marinsky, Limor (Lido Moriconi), Luigi Mormorelli, Park Dae Ghiu, Meliton Rivera Espinoza and Silvia Vendramel were placed in the public urban site of Piazza del Popolo of the same Municipality, under the title From the play of forms to the forms of play, while others by Giuseppe Bartolozzi and Clara Tesi, Franco Pegonzi, Adriano Bimbi, Lea Monetti, Rinaldo Bigi and Veronica Fonzo were located in the foyer of the former SS. Salvatore Hospital on via Roma.
The exhibition activity has been intense and diversified: regarding the exhibition curated by Giorgio Celli, “Art and Nature”, the photographic collective of Bentivoglio, Bugani, Marchetti was set up, later joined by Gianni Valbonesi, Marco Tomesani, Tatsunori Kano, Agnese Baruzzi, the triple solo exhibition of Eco M. Boscheri – L. Leonelli and G. Sevini; as well as the solo exhibitions of Buell, Angelo Dionigi, Fornaciari Dante, Mirta De Simoni Lasta, Octavia Monaco, Roberta Serenari, Danilo Mainardi, Guido Sammarch, Carla Scotti and Marco Mensa, Alessandro la Motta, Nevio Bedeschi, Enso Sofia Rocchetti, Agnese Baruzzi, Claudio Bonfiglioli, Nicola Samorì; the solo exhibition of Lamberto Caravita (2007), that dedicated to Francesco Martani, that of photographic shots by Lodovico Pignatti Morano, the homage by Claudia Cuzzeri to Ulisse Aldrovandi, all three in 2008, the solo exhibitions of Sergio Battaroli, Monica Musiani and Rolando Gandolfi in 2009, those of Donatella Stamer, Beatrice Donin, Nicola Filazzola and Enzo Tardia in 2010, and that of Giulio Mottinelli in 2011.
Among collective exhibitions were Neo-Avant-Gardes: from the ’50s to the ’70s at Ca’ la Ghironda, Wild Hearts, The Painted Mugello, Sculpture in Zola Predosa Our Mother Earth, The Body in Twentieth Century Painting at Ca’ la Ghironda, Creative Practices in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century at Ca’ la Ghironda, International Art: from the ’80s to the latest generations at Ca’ la Ghironda, Bios, Beyond the Pillars of Hercules – Landscape Painting from Peruzzini to Klein, Creative Practices in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, and the exhibition “Art in Romagna: an exploration” (2011).
The 2008 schedule featured exhibitions of paintings by Stefano Grasselli, Franco Savignano as well as the permanent exhibition “The Contemporary of the Contemporary” with acquisitions from 2000 to today, followed by the show “C-Voltaire fifteen years”, curated by Francesco Martani and Franco Savignano with works by Karin Andersen, Totò Cariello, SquP, Yannis Kopsinis, Stefano Marchesini, Michele Mariano, Luigi Mastrangelo and Gianni Pedullà. Also in 2008 were held the exhibitions: “Reload. Affectionate Photographs 1972-2008” and “Provocations among the Clouds. Art and Comics: new Italian dialogues”.
The year 2009 was the year of “Artistic Tribute to Woodstock”, an event organized in synergy with the Biografilm Festival, in which artists of different generations looked directly at the culture that animated the poetic and artistic spirit of this great rock event, and its subsequent influence on the lifestyles of the seventies.
In 2010 the double solo exhibition of Liliana Cano and Filippo di Mario and that of Ernesto Portas took place; in 2011, Ca’ la Ghironda hosted “Russian Fairy Tales”, “Jacques Brianti”, “More Contemporary Neo-Expressionism”, the solo exhibition of Laura Saccomanno and “Measuring the Sea” by Antonio Noia.
Information about Ca’ la Ghironda
Via Leonardo da Vinci, 19 – loc. Ponte Ronca,
40069 Zola Predosa (Bologna)
051757419
info@ghironda.it
https://www.ghironda.it
Source: MIBACT
