Cristiana Perrella appointed new Director of the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci

Cristiana Perrella is the new Director of the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato. Chosen by the institution’s board of governors (Fondazione per le Arti Contemporanee in Toscana) among the candidates shortlisted by a committee of experts after an international call, Cristiana Perrella will be given the task of guiding the museum for the next three years.

Curator and art critic, Cristiana Perrella (Rome, 1965) directed the Contemporary Arts Program of the British School at Rome from 1998 to 2008, where she held exhibitions by artists such as Cerith Wyn Evans, Francesco Vezzoli, Sam Taylor Wood, Richard Billingham, Martin Creed, Mark Wallinger, Yinka Shonibare, Leigh Bowery, Mike Nelson, Ian Kiaer, Jonathan Monk, Douglas Gordon, often commissioning and producing new works. She also curated many projects related to video-art including Sweetie- Female Identity in British Video and VideoVibe- Art, Music and Video in the UK. As an independent curator she collaborated with Italian and international institutions, such as MAXXI, in Rome, where she curated -on the occasion of the opening of the museum in May 2010- Kutlug Ataman Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, in 2012 the performance festival VIVA performance lab (with Tania Bruguera) and in 2015 a major new project by Adrian Paci, Sue Proprie Mani. From 2009 to 2017 she has been the art curator of Fondazione Golinelli, in Bologna, where she delivered a series of exhibitions focused on the relationship between art and science. She was one of the curators of the last edition of the Quadriennale di Roma, in 2016.

The Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci is the first Italian institution which has been built from scratch to exhibit, collect, document and promote contemporary art. Since its opening in 1988, it has produced a vast number of exhibitions and educational activities, together with a multidisciplinary programme including music, dance and cinema. It has built up a collection of over 1100 works which map artistic trends from the Sixties up to the present, mostly purchased in the wake of exhibitions. The heart of the collection comprises works from Arte Povera, Transavanguardia, Minimal, Body and Land Art and other movements, including a sizeable number of works from Visual Poetry and Radical Architecture, and on to the most recent international trends. 

In 2016 the Centro Pecci inaugurated the futuristic extension by Maurice Nio - NIO architecten, Rotterdam, which almost doubled the space of the original building designed by the rationalist architect Italo Gamberini. Today, in addition to approximately 3000 square meter of exhibition spaces, the complex hosts the CID/Visual Arts archive and specialized library, with its heritage of 60,000 or so books and documents; the cinema– auditorium; the bookshop; the restaurant and the bistro; the open-air theatre.

The current exhibition at Centro Pecci is MARK WALLINGER MARK, until June 3, 2018, the first museum exhibition in Italy of the British artist Mark Wallinger.

For more information please contact Ivan Aiazzi, Communications, Marketing and Development: i.aiazzi [​at​] centropecci.it or T +39 331-3174150