Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst in Trento Rovereto, Rovereto

It is a kind of “encyclopedic space” that brings together in a single architectural complex an Art Museum, a 20th Century Archive, a specialized Library, and 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 a renowned engineer from Trentino, Giulio Andreolli. Since its inauguration on December 15, 2002, the Rovereto cultural hub has become a national and international reference point in the field of research, conservation, and promotion of figurative arts of the contemporary era, from Romanticism to the present day. However, the history of the Mart began fifteen years earlier, in 1987, with the establishment of a provincial museum, intended to house – in the central seat of Palazzo Albere in Trento, in the 20th Century Archive, and in the Depero House-Museum in Rovereto – the modern and contemporary art collections acquired over 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, featuring 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. The VAF-Foundation in Frankfurt holds significant works by Carrà, De Chirico, and Casorati, also on deposit. The permanent exhibition route presents post-war artistic movements, from abstractionism to the experiences of the 1960s and 1970s (arte povera, minimal art, conceptual art, transavant-garde), from late 20th century art up to the very recent innovations of the early 21st century.

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