Depero Space to Space

Created in collaboration with the Mart – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, the exhibition, part of the ** Milan Cortina 2026 Cultural Olympics**, reveals a surprising parallelism that links, although in different eras, the barons Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi to Fortunato Depero, all eager to fulfill a dream: to live in spaces suspended between the ancient and the contemporary.

Space to Space is the staging of a vision in which the rooms become theatrical mechanisms. The environment filled with precious objects collected by the Bagatti Valsecchi brothers is overlaid with that of Fortunato Depero's late Futurist research, where each corresponds to two different narrative moments that complement each other: the 19th and 20th centuries, dream and life.

If the Bagatti Valsecchi is a house museum created in the late 19th century by the two brothers who set up their home to live in a late Renaissance residence, with paintings and applied art artifacts, Depero also represented the same impulse in the 1950s when he designed the Casa d'arte futurista in Rovereto: altering and integrating the 16th-century building destined to become his museum in order to house his own works.

The brothers' choice of Renaissance language was inherent in the cultural program launched by the Savoy monarchy in the aftermath of Italian unification, which identified that particular language as the vehicle for establishing the identity of a national art form. Similarly, Fortunato Depero, in the twilight of his life, found in his museum, architecturally far removed from his own language, the opportunity to consecrate his artistic persona in that magniloquent setting.

The exhibition, with works spanning the 1930s to the 1950s, offers a new and surprising journey, bringing together the permanent collection of the Bagatti Valsecchi House Museum and the creations of Fortunato Depero, which become guests in a unique setting specially designed by the A-Fact architecture studio in Milan to enhance the spatial and temporal location of works of art in a residential context.

Depero Space to Space. The creation of memory also aims to be an immersive experience to be enjoyed inside the museum's rooms, where some of the spaces are accompanied by sound by Gaetano Cappa of the Barlumen Institute, enhancing the visitor's sense of wonder as they feel transported into a festive, dynamic, and unique world.

Credits: Fortunato Depero (Fondo, TN, 1892 - Rovereto, TN, 1960) Cavalli sulla corda, 1948 - particolare olio su tavola, 95 x 82 cm Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto Fondo Depero © Fortunato Depero, by SIAE 2026