MILAN — For more than 20 years, the Prada Foundation has been staging contemporary art exhibitions in abandoned warehouses and disused churches here, bringing contemporary artists like Anish Kapoor and Michael Heizer to Italian audiences, often for the first time. The foundation has masterminded projects elsewhere, too, like the time the Belgian artist Carsten Holler created the Double Club, a restaurant and club in a Victorian warehouse in London, drawing patrons like Mick Jagger and Penélope Cruz.
Recently, however, the Prada Foundation has set its sights on establishing permanent homes to present exhibitions and to show its vast holdings of art, mostly works from the 1950s to the present. Four years ago, it opened an outpost in an 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice. Now it is putting down roots on the site of an old distillery in a scruffy industrial neighborhood here. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA have created a sprawling complex with nearly 120,000 square feet of exhibition space that, when it opens on May 9, is poised to become a major international destination for the arts.
“After more than 20 years of staging exhibitions around the world, my husband said he thought it was about time we do something permanent in Milan,” Miuccia Prada said on a recent afternoon, sipping tea in a conference room at her office near the new site, a spare space with just one artwork, Gerhard Richter’s “Five Doors,” dramatically consuming an entire wall.
While the foundation has had modest galleries, this will be its first serious presence in Milan. The new site, a campus of buildings set around a courtyard, has more than twice the exhibition space of the galleries at the new Whitney Museum of American Art.
Barely six months ago, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the French luxury fashion behemoth, opened an arts center in Paris, designed by Frank Gehry, for an estimated $143 million. Now Prada is devoting an even bigger space to the arts in Milan. It comes at a time when private money from luxury good brands is beginning to fill a void left by government cutbacks as European economies are in free-fall. At the same time, these companies are finding that associating with the art world helps them enhance their brands and increase their reach. “In much the same way LVMH opened their foundation in Paris, Prada is consolidating the exclusive perception that brands like theirs deal with beautiful things,” said Luca Solca, a luxury goods analyst for Exane BNP Paribas in London. “And the association with art is a natural extension.” He added that this could be seen as Prada’s attempt to “gentrify the brand even more.”
While Milan may be a center for fashion and furniture design, it has not been known for contemporary art or the kind of inventive museum exhibitions that attract international audiences. With the city’s cultural institutions battered by budget cuts, there is an opportunity to make an impact. “The new Prada Foundation is building on a tradition that began when the collector Giuseppe Panza created a contemporary art destination in a 17th-century villa in Varese just outside of Milan,” said Emily Braun, an Italian art historian and curator. “But this is right in Milan; it’s also interdisciplinary and a kind of patronage that seeks collaboration. Potentially it will fill the role of a contemporary art museum.”
There will be a theater for films, live performances and lectures (Roman Polanski has created a documentary for the opening), an old-fashioned Milanese bar created by the director Wes Anderson, a center for children and eventually a large library. The foundation will be open to the public seven days a week, and general admission will be 10 euros (about $11). Prada S.p.A., which acts as a sponsor towards the foundation, has financed the entire complex itself, according to executives at the foundation. While Mrs. Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, chief executive of the fashion brand, are not saying how much it cost, people familiar with the project believe it was considerably less expensive than the LVMH Foundation.
Salvatore Settis, an Italian art historian and scholar who has organized companion exhibitions, one for the new foundation in Milan and the other for its Venice home, called the project “unprecedented.”
“There is nothing comparable in Italy,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is something really avant-garde. To have a private foundation create a permanent institution that is open to the public is a major gesture, one that will have deep significance now and for future generations.”
Seven years in the making, the new art complex includes original industrial buildings juxtaposed with dramatic new ones.
On a recent spring day, Mr. Koolhaas, in a hard hat and mud-covered sneakers, was surveying the construction. “People talk about preservation, and they talk about new architecture,” he said, standing in the middle of the courtyard pointing out the functions of each building. “But this is neither. Here new and old confront each other in a state of permanent interaction. They are not meant to be seen as one.”
The original 1910 distillery — seven spaces including old warehouses and brewing silos — has retained its raw, industrial and often quirky qualities. Some of the spaces are as Mr. Koolhaas found them; others have been reconfigured but look as though they haven’t been touched. The three new buildings are made of glass, white concrete and an aluminum that has been “exploded,” as Mr. Koolhaas described it, so that it has an airy, foamy surface. One is a large exhibition pavilion for temporary shows; another is a nine-story tower that will house long-term installations and a restaurant; the third building, the theater, has mirrored, stainless steel folding walls, allowing the space to open onto the courtyard for outdoor performances.
Unlike the LVMH Foundation, the Prada Foundation will not be selling architect-designed handbags festooned with its label at its opening. Nor will it have the Prada logo on the foundation’s facade. Mr. Bertelli and Mrs. Prada said they have kept their support of the arts separate from their brand and are not calling the new foundation headquarters a museum.
As a private foundation in Italy, there are no tax benefits for the project, a spokesman for the foundation said.
“We wanted to use the collection as an instrument for exploring ideas by many different voices,” Mrs. Prada explained. Although the couple have collected art for more than two decades and are involved in every aspect of the foundation, they have put together a team of experts including Germano Celant, an independent curator, and Astrid Welter, who heads the foundation’s curatorial team. Also contributing ideas is a group of scholars, historians and curators they call the Thought Counsel who keep them up-to-date on art happenings around the world.
The foundation’s inaugural program is ambitious. One of the exhibitions, “Serial Classic,” organized by Mr. Settis, will explore the notions of original and imitation, using Roman antiquities that are actually reproductions of lost Greek originals. Loans are coming from more than 40 museums, Mr. Settis said, including the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In other galleries, just steps away from the first-century bronzes and marble busts, will be site-specific installations created by renowned contemporary artists.
(“Portable Classic,” a companion show organized by Mr. Settis, opens on May 9 at the foundation in Venice. It will include about 90 miniature reproductions of classical sculptures made primarily from the 15th through the 17th centuries.)
“In the last few years, I’ve gotten very interested in antiquities and have been reading and studying about them,” Mrs. Prada said. “So I thought it would be fantastic to open with exhibitions about ancient art both here and in Venice to show the influence they have had on so much art being produced today.”
Also enthusiastic about film, dance, theater and literature, Mrs. Prada, clad in a simple navy blue dress and platform heels, exudes a boundless curiosity, amiably questioning a visitor about current exhibitions and emerging artists. She is known for making studio visits by herself. Damien Hirst, Thomas Demand and Robert Gober, artists who have worked with her for years, say she is sympathetic to the trials that go with their work, given her experience designing fashion.
Recently, Mr. Bertelli and Mrs. Prada have not limited their buying to 20th- and 21st-century art. The foundation recently acquired a late-15th-century Northern Italian marquetry studiolo — or small paneled room — which will be shown in one of the new galleries.
There will be echoes of ancient art on the facade of one of the old buildings, a four-story structure that Mr. Koolhaas calls the haunted house because it was so dilapidated when he first saw it. It now has a dreamy gold-leafed exterior, applied by artisans trained in the ancient technique of rubbing small squares of gold into a surface. The choice of gold, Mrs. Prada said, “gives importance to something very modest” and over time, it will take on a soft patina like an ancient sculpture.
“Milan is like a pancake with few high-rise elements,” Mr. Koolhaas explained. “The environment is so gray it needed a little color.” As the light changes throughout the day, he added, the gold will cast reflections on the surrounding buildings.
Artworks can be found in unexpected places. “Processo Grottesco,” a major installation by Mr. Demand, the German photographer who has also worked as a curator for the foundation, will be on view in a space beneath the theater.
The foundation showed the installation in Venice in 2007, and it is recreating it here. Mr. Demand painstakingly creates environments and then photographs them, in this case a grotto on the isle of Majorca. Not only will the monumental photograph be on view, but so will the entire process that went into its creation, including research materials and the enormous set of the grotto — a 36-ton cardboard model composed of 900,000 sections. Mrs. Prada had persuaded Mr. Demand to save every scrap including the model, a first, according to his dealer, Matthew Marks, as the artist normally destroys his sets.
Also on view from the foundation’s collection will be dozens of paintings, photographs, drawings, installations and sculptures organized by art historical moments that Mrs. Prada feels are relevant today. That includes American Minimalism, Conceptualism and Land Art, and work by Walter de Maria, Ed Kienholz, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Cornell and Pino Pascali. There are also younger figures like the Swedish sculptor and film animator Nathalie Djurberg.
“One day I got a call out of the blue asking if Miuccia could come over,” Mr. Gober recalled, sitting in his Chelsea studio the other day. That was in 2009, and she kept returning. Now a group of his sculptures will occupy three floors of the so-called haunted house. “She intuitively decided that I should be there along with Louise Bourgeois,” Mr. Gober said, pleased to be paired with an artist whose work he has long admired.
His installation includes a 2010 sculpture of a man’s leg with an anchor attached as well as a new version of what appears to be a grate you’d find on a city sidewalk. Visitors peering beneath its surface will discover a creek with running water and a red glass heart in the center of what looks like a bunch of sticks, stones, rocks and dead leaves. Every one of those seemingly natural objects, however, is an impeccably handcrafted sculpture.
As the level of the running water was being tested in his studio, Mr. Gober discussed the new foundation. “It’s not like anything anyone has created before,” he said, adding that its impact on Milan will be significant. “But then again working with Miuccia is different than working with most collectors. She’s like dealing with another artist.”
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