Nanda Vigo - Private Collection

The rooms of Genesis Space have been specially created in the San Fedele Museum to house a selection of the works donated by the artist, architect and designer Nanda Vigo to the San Fedele Cultural Foundation (108 works in total). The unusual juxtapositions, the cross-references of shapes and colours, the "crowds" that refuse to submit to the criteria of a rigorous linear or chronological exhibition, are intended to evoke the creative atmosphere that existed in the artist's Milanese home, where works, set up everywhere, were an integral part of everyday life. Approximately sixty works will thus allow the visitor to see a cross-section of 20th century Italian and international art, especially from the 1960s and 1970s. The collection fits fully into the San Fedele Museum's itinerary, indeed, it constitutes its starting point. Based on the research that began in the 1950s, the works highlight the need to "start again from scratch", marking a definitive break with the dogmas of traditional art: an epochal change, therefore. It is a "starting again" that involves the different aspects of human life, as is evident in the research of Lucio Fontana, who aims to cross the surface of reality to move towards the "beyond" of the canvas, towards an absolute, a transcendence, or of Piero Manzoni, who intends to propose total spaces with his Achrome, open to infinite possible meanings. The Nanda Vigo collection thus constitutes a fundamental addition to the works already present in the Museum, which unfold in the spaces of the Church of San Fedele and in the adjoining spaces, bringing to the surface that dialectic between art and faith, between present and past, between human research and religious research, which expresses man's desire to live an experience, from which what is authentically human emerges, continually stretched between life and death, pain and joy, aspiration to a destiny of communion and fraternity. The rooms that house the works of the donation establish a significant link with the research carried out by Galleria San Fedele in those same decades of the 20th century, thus placing itself in close dialogue with the historical exhibition tradition of San Fedele, which has always been characterised by great experimentalism and attention to contemporary languages.