The Museum Of Avant-Garde
The Museum of Avant-garde gathers an original body of work from private collections and offers a unique perspective of the cultural and artistic meaning of the avant-garde movements. By its very nature, this phenomenon propounded an incredible diversity of creative expressions and a multi-faceted artistic landscape that rippled in all corners of the world and inspired artists for decades to follow. Far from being a cohesive movement, the avant-gardes became synonymous with a transformative ideology, alternative visual codes and daring experimentations that put them at the forefront of anti-establishment and breakup of political and societal conventions.
The permanent collection brings together prominent figures and avant-garde leaders, who dedicated their lives to push the boundaries of art in all its dimensions, to advocate the possibilities of an alternative reality, a palpable utopia in a revolutionary world, and in doing so they laid the groundwork of new artistic investigations. The diversity and fervour of these art groups and movements shook the collective conscience of their time and redefined our understanding and interpretation of art.
One of the major avant-garde legacy is its power to transfigure everyday, ordinary objects into art, infuse them with new value and significance, elevating not only things but also creative forms. It is Duchamp’s fountain in 1917, or the photographic medium that emancipated itself to obtain its own art merit, or the radical Bauhaus crafting techniques, now respected manifestations of creativity and the convergence of different artistic expressions to give birth to something else, unseen and original… These examples are the result of the broad legacy of avant-garde, which the Museum fosters and encourages.
With this outlook MA-g has decided to initiate a contemporary collection, to feature the greatest examples of new creative languages, resulted from today’s context, made possible by a market that is artistic and commercial at the same time and yet embeds the same archetypal novelty and inspirational standpoint. The contemporary collection includes works from various creative disciplines to dignify the artistic genius that takes over where the avant-garde spirit left off, an aesthetic concept of modernity to be found a century later also in commercial executions.
This collection is in development and will be curated and broadened thanks to the involvement of outstanding artists, designers, photographers and illustrators, who have witnessed and shaped the evolving creative landscape in the past decades. Every year they join the Museum’s panel as mentors and judges, to award with a special prize named after them other contemporary artists’ latest works of distinction, supporting their recognition of original and pioneering creativity. Selected artworks published on MA-g digital platform will be displayed in the new MA-g venue from 2025.
