Iconic Italian contemporary art museum hosts exhibit of Israeli artists

The iconic Museum of 21st Century Arts MAXXI in Rome hosted an exhibition of Israeli artists last spring. The exhibition also offered the opportunity to celebrate Israel’s 75th birthday.

Titled “Conscious Collective,” the exhibition featured works by Tsibi Geva, Maria Saleh Mahameed and Noa Yekutieli.

The initiative aimed to narrate a choral but at the same time individual story, characterized by the peculiarity of each artist and their own stylistic technique. The goal was for the three points of view to intertwine together, producing a site-specific symphony designed for the MAXXI exhibition space.

The "collective unconscious" in question is that of a country in constant conflict. However, each artist enriched the experience of conflict through their own perspective which is both individual and national, each representing different gender, generation, ethnic and religious identities.

The exhibition was curated by MAXXI’s Director Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Israeli artist Shai Baitel, artistic director of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai. It was organized in cooperation with the leading Italian bank Intesa San Paolo.

The event marked the second time that the prominent Italian museum hosted an exhibition at the initiative of the Embassy of Israel in Rome - after the exhibition “The White City” devoted to Tel Aviv was deemed a great success in 2018.

“I consider this exhibition a particularly important achievement because it offered the Italian audience a contemporary and up-to-date view of the state of art in Israel,” said Dr. Maya Katzir, the Embassy’s Cultural Attaché, who first pitched the idea for the exhibition to MAXXI.

The embassy also organized the reception for Israel's 75th Independence Day at the museum. The guests could enjoy special tours of the exhibition. Attendees at the event included President of the Italian Senate Ignazio La Russa and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana.

Following their cooperation in Italy, the three artists Geva, Mahameed and Yekutieli just inaugurated a new collective exhibition at the Petah Tikva Museum.