After the success of the first edition, the Milano Drawing Week is back in the spotlight with a lot of news and participants. The festival aims to engage the entire city with the art of drawing. The event develops in a series of exhibitions, across Milan, entirely dedicated to drawing, from modern to contemporary artists.
With this second edition of Milano Drawing Week, Collezione Ramo reaffirms its relationship with the city and it serves as a hub for various exhibitions and institutions and as a place for reflections on the artistic activity of drawing.
We talked to Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, the curator of the Collezione Ramo, about this year’s edition.
Milan Drawing Week is back. What’s new for this year?
This year, new galleries are participating such as Giò Marconi, Zero, Staiger, Ciaccia Levi, Clima, Martina Simeti and Renata Fabbri and many sponsors who trust our commitment to promote modern and contemporary drawing. The great success of the previous edition made the whole organization more fluid.
How do you select the works on paper and the network in town?
Every year I look for the best representatives of contemporary drawing, not only Italian, but among the international artists represented by the milanese galleries. Then, I contact the related gallery and I send each artist the link to see the entire Collezione Ramo, Italian drawings of the last century, so that everyone can choose a work to present in their solo exhibition. The exhibition is therefore conceived in relation to this dialogue between modern and contemporary drawing.
Between ancient and modern – what are the encounters that surprised you the most?
The collaboration with the cabinet of drawings of the Castello Sforzesco, therefore with one of the civic museums of Milan is very important to me. Italian artists of the 20th century knew ancient drawing very well and their practice started from there. Therefore, relating a modern Italian drawing to an ancient one means retracing the history of Italian art, offering the public free exhibitions of exceptional quality and rarity.
This year an abstract portrait by Mario Radice dialogues with a late 1500s female portrait by Federico Barocci.
The project is becoming more and more a fixture in the city’s calendar and a great opportunity to show the Ramo Collection. Which projects do you have in mind for the future?
As curator of the Collezione Ramo, our intention is to continue proposing exhibitions on modern and contemporary drawing to create a culture on this medium and to overcome the stereotypes of inferiority that still weigh on drawing compared to other artistic expressions. And I’m already working on Milano Drawing Week 2023.
