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Taking care of a collection of modern and contemporary art

Educational project led by Rischa Paterlini, curator of the Giuseppe Iannaccone collection
May 2019

Starting with the study of the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection, participants were provided with an up-to-date framework for the care of an art collection and its enhancement. In particular, the techniques of organising and promoting an artistic/cultural event through the practical organisation and management of an exhibition in an unconventional location were analysed.

Theory hours
1 h. Introduction to the collection and study
1 h. Collecting: getting involved, communicating, dialoguing and collaborating
1 h. In-Practice Project

Practice hours
Hypothesis of new editions In Practice and guidance in the conception of an artistic project with related collective exercises

Group work
2 hours
The last two hours will be used for a group discussion of the different projects.
Extra 20 hours
Visiting the collection


Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection

Giuseppe Iannaccone was born in Avellino on 25 November 1955. He moved to Milan in the early 70s and graduated in Law, founding the law firm of the same name. In the early 1990s, he discovered a passion for art and, with the conviction that the work is born from the artist’s idea, but then lives and takes on meaning only in the eyes of the observer, Giuseppe Iannaccone undertook the search for those artists who most express his idea of romanticism and worldview.

The Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection has a very special genesis and growth. The corpus of works assembled from the late 1980s onwards is strongly modelled on the spirit of the collector who searched in paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography and video for strong, almost shouted, true feelings of humanity. Thus, the search led him to discover the interwar art of Corrente, the Roman School and the Six of Turin, and a whole series of painters who were strongly attuned to feelings, to emotions that they transformed into art. In these works, colour speaks, expresses itself, and the subjects chime with everyday reality.

With the same attitude, lawyer Giuseppe Iannaccone approached contemporary art, enriching his collection with works by the most promising international artists, from Luigi Ontani to Micheal Borremans, from Andrea Bowers to Nicole Eisenman, from Shirin Neshat to Pietro Roccasalva, from Nan Goldin to Lisetta Carmi, from Zoe Leonard to Lynette-Yadom Boakye, from Allison Katz to Imran Qureshi, from Marinella Senatore to Adrian Paci up to the younger Toyin Ojih Odutola and Katia Seib, extending its research to video-art by acquiring works by Nathalie Djurberg, Adrian Paci and Regina Jose Galindo.

A very special relationship, however, links Collector Giuseppe Iannaccone to the performance that, thanks to the skill of the young artist Roberto Fassone, came to life for the first time inside the studio in the autumn of 2017.

“One of these stories is true” was a surreal tour of the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection, a journey of anecdotes and coincidences; a tale that begins in a dream and continues in a small Swedish town, passes through secrets hidden in a cake, bronze lucky charm girls, lies, copies of lies, memories, perfumes, hearts beating every thousand years and wordless libraries. One true story and sixteen others hovering between the possible and the improbable, the incredible and the plausible, reality and fiction.


Rischa Paterlini

Curator, since the first half of the 2000s, she has been in charge full-time of the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection. She has curated exhibitions at public institutions in Italy and abroad, organised non-profit events, supervised a project on video art for the TV channel All Music, and written for a number of important trade journals. She has also been a speaker and moderator at conferences, in universities and academies on the role of the collector and collection curator. On the occasion of the Rome Art Fair, The road to Contemporary Art, she was a member of the advisory board. Since 2018 she has been a lecturer for NABA in the master’s course CONTEMPORARY ART MARKETS. Among her numerous publications are the 2009 catalogue “Una caccia amorosa, Arte Italiana tra le due guerre nella collezione Iannaccone” published by Skira; in 2016 “Collezione Giuseppe Iannaccone Volume I – Italia 1920-1945 Una nuova figurazione e il racconto del sé” and in 2018 the publication for Estorick Collection of modern Italian art “A New Figurative Art 1920-1945: Works from the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection “and also in 2018 the publication “Come in un romanzo” for the exhibition Eroticommunism by Iva Lulashi.

Co-creator and curator of the IN PRATICA project which, through a succession of exhibitions, aims to propose a confrontation between the works of artists already consecrated on the international scene present in the Collection and those of talented emerging artists, even if still unknown to the general public, invited for the occasion to conceive site-specific projects set up in places not generally designated for public exhibitions. For the occasion, she curated publications by Davide Monaldi, Luca De Leva, Andrea Romano, Ex-Gratia – 10 Albanian Artists in Dialogue with the Collection, Beatrice Marchi, Giovanni Iudice and Cleo Fariselli.

Taking care of a collection of modern and contemporary art
Curating workshop
May 2019

Curated by
Rischa Paterlini, curator of the Giuseppe Iannaccone collection