The Collection

Allora & Calzadilla, Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speach), 2007 HOPE, Exhibtion view. Photo Credits: Luca Guadagnini

The Museion collection was established at the end of the 1980s and currently features around 4,400 works. It is the result of a targeted policy of acquisitions, loans and donations and in collaboration with private collections.

The initial focus was on Italian avant-garde artists with a particular interest in Central Europe. But, over the years, the museum has developed a more specialised profile by means of specific focus areas. The focus area of Light Art features works from the historic art movement Kineticism, as well as works produced between 1950s and 1960s and more recent practices that work with spacial installations. The largest and richest body of works in the Museion collection investigate Language and Art. This was significantly enhanced in 2021 through the donation by Paolo Della Grazia of part of his Archivio di Nuova Scrittura collection.

Targeting acquisitions from both solo and group exhibitions organized at the museum, the collection strives to uphold a harmonious representation of  local and international artists. Consequently, Museion’s acquisitions have been guided by the TECHNO HUMANITIES long-term research program since its inception in 2020.

The artworks of the collection are preserved, loaned internationally, and constantly presented in new ways. The collection presentations in the Museion Passage reflect current affairs and a global perspective.

Collaborations with private collections are the outcome of a process rooted in sharing and solidarity. Key contributors to this effort include the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura, the Enea Righi collection, and the Stiftung Südtiroler Sparkasse collection.

For artwork loan requests: elena.bini@museion.it
For photographic material loan requests: katia.cont@museion.it / elena.bini@museion.it

View the Collection online

Archivio di Nuova Scrittura

The Archivio di Nuova Scrittura or ANS conserves one of the world’s largest visual writing art, book and document collections assembled by the Milanese collector Paolo Della Grazia since 1988. Entrusted in 1998 to Museion (the artworks) and the Mart Museum in Rovereto (the library and archives) on a free-loan basis, the Archive was then donated to the two museums between 2019 and 2021. The Archivio di Nuova Scrittura at Museion includes a core of 1,800 works by Italian and international artists related to experimental visual writing art forms, like the Visual and Concrete Poetry movements. Over the years, Museion has further expanded this area through research projects, new acquisitions, and collaborations.

The VVV-VerboVisualeVirtuale platform allows users to consult the entire ANS collection kept at Museion and Mart.

The Enea Righi Collection

The Enea Righi Collection is one of Italy’s most important private contemporary art collections. From the perspective of artistic genres, it features different forms of expression, including video, photography, painting, sculpture, architecture and performing arts while thematically focusing on the body and socio-political activism. However different they may be, all these works share a high level of sensitivity to art forms in which intellectualism and materiality, conceptuality and sensuality, engagement and form come together.

The approximately 100 works entrusted to the Museion collection, in the form of a free long-term loan, complement areas of the museum collection, like its photography section, its light works (Gabriel Kuri) and its works by individual artists (Mirosław Bałka, Alighiero Boetti, Roni Horn, Gordon Matta-Clark).