Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli founded the Fondazione Prada in 1993, and opened a new exhibition space in the historic palazzo of Ca’ Corner Della Regina on the Grand Canal in May 2011, led under the artistic direction of Germano Celant. Following on from their various symbiotic partnerships, OMA led by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, has since been commissioned to design the intervention and transformation of an early 20th century industrial building to the south of Milan. It was to the former that I paid a visit to today, to see their latest exhibition ‘The Small Utopia Ars Multiplicata’.
The title of the exhibition refers to the desire to encourage the spread of art in society through the multiplication of objects- a movement that became popular at the beginning of the 20th century through to the 1970s with the emergence of Surrealism, Op Art, Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism. The ground floor of the palazzo takes you through a series of cavernous rooms, exploring the different media in which the boundaries of art disperse, from artist’s manifestos and magazines, to sound recordings and experimental films. The main bulk of the exhibition appears on the mezzanine and first floor. This section explores the idea of uniqueness in art, with classic examples from Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, causing the exhibition to take the form a ‘supermarket’ of art objects, with artist’s originals and multiples, all in repetitive glass cases lined up in the great palazzo.
