On Saturday 18 April 2015, in the upper rooms of Palazzo Santa Margherita, the Galleria civica di Modena opened the exhibition dedicated to the new acquisitions of the institution. Over recent years, thanks to a careful cultural policy aimed at increasing the Gallery’s own assets, more than 500 works have been included in the Drawing and Photography Collections, largely donated by artists or collectors, or granted on long-term loan. The research deployed on this occasion has also allowed for the rediscovery of a number of works which, despite having been added to the Collections in the recent past, have still not been put on public display.

The exhibition, curated by Gabriella Roganti, features a selection of these works, and among others, will display drawing works by Aldo Bandinelli, Vittorio Corsini, Gianfranco Ferroni, Josep Ginestar, Mario Giovanardi, Claudia Losi, Roberto Paci Dalò, Nakis Panayotidis, Bepi Romagnoni, Claudio Verna, Moe Yoshida, as well as photographs by Giorgio Barrera, Elina Brotherus, Bruno Cattani, Mario Cresci, Mario De Biasi, Franco Fontana, Luca Gilli, Ferdinando Scianna and Diego Zuelli, to name but a few.

Furthermore, the exhibition itinerary will also house a selection of the 114 etchings by Italian artists donated in 2013 by the Association for the Spread of Artworks of Modena, which after some 50 years of activity has decided to bequeath its own graphic art collection to the Galleria Civica di Modena (those dating back over the last 30 years) and its archive documentation to the ‘Luigi Poletti’ civic library, a gesture which thus allows the community to preserve the memory of an exemplary creative period, both in terms of art from the local territory and around the country.

The itinerary comes to a close with a set of drawings by Giorgio Preti, the Modenese artist who died in 1961 at just 21 years of age, to whom an exhibition was dedicated just a few years after his death in the historical Sala di Cultura in the Palazzo dei Musei. Today these works may be found in the Gallery’s collections thanks to a major donation made by the Preti family, made up of several hundred works, including drawings, sketches and paintings, which will be presented in their entirety in 2016 in the exhibition rooms of the Museo Civico as part of a broader investigation into the work of this highly talented young artist.