CENTRO PER L'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA LUIGI PECCI

The Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci [Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art] is the first Italian institution built from scratch to display, collect, document and promote the most advanced artistic research. Since its opening in 1988, the Centre has arranged a large number of exhibitions and documentation on contemporary art, numerous didactic programmes, performances and multimedia events. It has collected over a thousand works that map artistic trends from the 1960s to the present: painting, sculpture, cinema and video, installations, works on paper, artists’ books, photographs, graphics, applied arts and commissioned projects — all representing today clear proof of the critical research and carefully-informed choices that have shaped the identity of the Centro Pecci and of contemporary art in Tuscany.

The ongoing collection, the continual exhibitions and various cultural programmes for the public, are backed up by the CID/Arti Visive, whose specialized archive and library afford scholars an array of about 50,000 volumes consisting of catalogues of exhibitions and collections, essays and monographs, a library of 300 Italian and foreign journals, an audiovisual section, and an outstanding collection of posters, invitations and press releases, museum guidebooks, auctioneering catalogues and bibliographical bulletins.

The Centro Pecci is at present in the process of being enlarged — with a futuristic-looking ring-shaped plan commissioned from the Florentine architect Italo Gamberini — to accommodate it in premises appropriate for its cultural role as the hub of the “regional network for contemporary art”.