(14 November, 2016) The Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) opened its doors in the heart of the Big Apple in 2014, specialising in Italian modern art. The non-profit organisation was founded by art historian, curator and collector, Laura Mattioli, daughter of the great art collector, Gianni Mattioli. “I was driven to found CIMA at first by a strong sense of how Italian art of the twentieth century is misunderstood outside of Italy. I also wished to offer opportunities to young scholars in the field of Italian history of art and to support more research in this field. I hope that our fellows at CIMA can expand their thinking about art, learning from the works themselves and from collaborating with people who have been trained in different methods”. On October 14, CIMA inaugurated their fourth exhibition with an exhibition dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico and Giulio Paolini which is preceded by exhibitions dedicated to Fortunato Depero, one of the protagonists of futurism; and the sculptor Medardo Rosso and the master painter and printmaker, Giorgio Morandi. Exhibitions at CIMA are part of an entire calendar of public programmes, encounters and fellowships. The goal of the non-profit is to act as an incubator for other museums and galleries and for a new academic debate on Twentieth-century Italian art, inviting fellows twice a year to study and live with the works of art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has in fact chose to include three works from Medardo Rosso in their exhibition “Unfinished: Thoughts Made Visible” that were previously displayed at CIMA that inaugurated their new Met Breuer building earlier this year (the former Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue). This year CIMA welcomed the two fellows, Giovanni Casini (Courtauld Institute of London) and Maria (Freie Universität in Berlin). At the heart of CIMA’s mission is the idea of “Slow Art” and its arrangement similar to a collector’s residence than a typical gallery just as Laura Mattioli was immersed since a young age in the collection of her father, Gianni, in their Milan home. As the director Heather Ewing explained, “we are offering a unique and intimate experience of seeing art, where we encourage close looking, asking what can we learn from seeing a work over a long period of time, in different lights and different moods?”
