Rossini Art Site

The passion for art of the entrepreneur and patron Alberto Rossini, who died in 2015, dates back to 1953, when, at the age of twenty, he made his first purchase. It was a sculpture, the statue of a dancer that Alberto saw in the studio of sculptor Gaetano Negri, at the time Marino Marini's assistant.

Later Alberto Rossini shared his passion for art with his wife Luisa and together they created a collection focused on the protagonists of the Italian art scene of the second half of the Twentieth century that today you can visit in the Rossini Art Site sculpture park.

The collection covers several themes, from the Concrete Art Movement to Informal Art, from European Abstraction to Nouveau Réalisme. The first works were purchased between the 1970s and 1980s. These are artists of informal art and among these to be preferred are Tancredi, Vedova, Dova, Crippa, Fontana, Capogrossi, Birolli, Morlotti, Cassinari, but also Abstract artists from Como such as Rho and Radice.

The most important nucleus of the collection was purchased between the Mid-Eighties and the end of the Nineties. During these years the preference was for the protagonists of Italian sculpture, i.e. for those authors, who were the first in Italy, from the immediate Postwar period up to the mid-sixties, to introduce the revolution of abstraction in sculpture, with new rules and a new way of making sculpture, breaking the tradition of figuration. An example is Giulio Turcato's work, Le Libertà sculture made of iron painted in various tonal colours, about 9 metres high each.

But also the work Art of Plastic Counterpoint No. 1 by Fausto Melotti, an abstract sculpture consisting of spears, threads, curvilinear shapes, foils and plates, placed in an unpredictable order reminiscent of the writing of a pentagram. The structure is a gigantic parallelepiped that develops in length, open on all sides and rhythmic inside by the alternation of bars, circles and other geometric elements. Alberto Rossini bought it in 1990 from a private collector, who in turn bought it after having seen it at the Venice Biennale in 1986. It is installed above a recovery tank for rainwater, thus reflecting the artist's intentions.

Also in the Nineties Rossini became passionate about the Nouveau Réalisme and together with his friend Pierre Restany, art critic, bought works by Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, among others. Tinguely created for Rossini metamechanical sculptures (operable by the public) composed of metal wires, moving and rotating irons at variable speed, posed as a caricature of the machine and the overproduction of material goods in our society.

Finally Alberto Rossini, as a true art lover, supported several young artists, whose poetics he appreciated. With these artists,  the collector became friends as well as patrons. They were invited in residence at the Rossini Art Site and as a result, site-specific works such as Antonio Ievolella's "Secret" or Franz Stähler's "Amphorae" and "Tulips" were created, as well as Andrea Cascella, Pietro Consagra, Dennis Oppenheim, and the Mexican Raymundo Sesma, a multidisciplinary artist who investigates social architecture as a built work, as a method and concept of transversality. By Raymundo Sesma in 2014 Alberto Rossini bought the last work in his collection.

The collection is now carried on by Alberto Rossini's sons, Marco and Matteo, who keep the park alive by inviting established and emerging artists to develop performances and site-specific projects, which enrich the collection with new works, as in the case of the recent contributions by Chiara Mu, entitled " esercizi di fuga" curated by Francesca Guerisoli. Chiara Mu's artistic practice is expressed exclusively in the context of specific interventions on place or situation, using installations, performances and videos as preferential ways of working.