Twenty years ago, the tire company Pirelli decided to create an exhibition space. This fall, Jean Tinguely’s huge sculptures will take over.
A half-hour drive from central Milan and its high-fashion boutiques is a vast compound where locomotives and farm machinery were once manufactured, and which today is dedicated to a single activity: the display of contemporary art.
Pirelli HangarBicocca has been up and running for 20 years: It was established in September 2004 as a nonprofit contemporary-art foundation by the Italian tire maker Pirelli, which supplies tires for Formula 1.
It was inspired by Tate Modern, the power station turned museum in London, and at first glance, the two spaces have much in common: the postindustrial architecture, the soaring ceilings, the vast exhibition spaces. And not coincidentally, a onetime director of Tate Modern, Vicente Todolí, was hired in 2012 to run the Milan foundation’s artistic program.
Yet Pirelli HangarBicocca is no Tate copycat. Instead of using its largest exhibition space to display a single commissioned artwork (as Tate does), it stages site-specific career surveys of artists, preferably living ones.
Over the years, the massive Navate space has hosted the room-sized “environments” of the Argentine Italian painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana, the mesmeric installations of the performance artist Joan Jonas, the suspended neon sculptures of the Welsh-born Cerith Wyn Evans, and the dramatic film works of the British artist Steve McQueen.
From Oct. 10 to Feb. 2, HangarBicocca will be overtaken by an artist whose works mesh perfectly with the space: the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, who died in 1991, but left a legacy of spinning metallic megamachines, more than 30 of which will swarm the Navate, recalling the days when it was a locomotive factory.
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