TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai

Fondazione Prada – campus of exhibition space is the ideal venue that represents Milan’s embrace of art and fashion.

Francesco Vezzoli was the guest of honor at a rollicking dinner in Milan Sunday night, on the occasion of his new show at La Fondazione, “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai,” which was produced in conjunction with the country’s national broadcasting company to explore political upheaval in Italy in the 1970s.

The guests attending the Prada Foundation that evening included Courtney Love and Milla Jovovich. There was Susan Sarandon, bedecked in Prada, and the collector Dasha Zhukova, sitting with Francesco Bonami and Ms. Prada herself. Even Cicciolina was there—Ilona Staller, former wife of Jeff Koons made immortal in his “Made in Heaven” series. Her date for the night was their son, Ludwig Koons.

The show itself was busy, and focused on that era of Italian media’s “anarchic, revolutionary character,” as Vezzoli called it in a text.

As for the show, it’s a tour de force: a suite of work by Boetti, de Chirico, Pistoletto, and Burri—along with a series of accompanying video work projected in a cluster at the end—in the downstairs building give way to a darkened gallery upstairs, where screens are playing news clips of various calamities of the 1970s. Then comes a gigantic space, and projected on the wall is footage of women’s marches in Italy, where the pervasive Catholic sentiment was no friend to abortion rights.

The exhibition will be held from 9 May to 24 September 2017.

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