With focus the past months on what has been closed and locked down in Italy, we are welcoming this moment to introduce the highly engaging and thoughtful Collezione Taurisano as a new collection with IC! The young collecting pair Francesco and Sveva really offer us a view into their private home, where a selection of the collection not only hangs, but which they very much use to activate their collection and artistic positions. Everyone is welcome to visit!

Collezione Taurisano is based in Naples, with a contemporary focus and strong international artist line-up including several young and emerging positions. Initiated by Paolo Taurisano in the 1970s, it currently flourishes thanks to the passion of son Francesco and his wife Sveva D’Antonio. Today the collection is dedicated to living artists, who deal with thematics linked to our everyday society. There are no restrictions on medium, and the artist is nurtured further when a fruitful relationship has developed, which instigates specific attention to the process of the making of an artwork. The collection is now abundant with almost 400 pieces.

Italian-style, the Taurisano men are concerned with the family business (a leading entity in promoting and distributing technical industrial products in Italy and Europe), which Francesco has managed from the beginning, with his father and brother. As a child, Francesco alreay shared his father’s passion for art and for this reason, began to study Italian art. With thanks to a friendship with a Neapolitan gallerist, Francesco discovered Transavanguardia (Italian version of Neo-expressionism) and started to collect some of its artists, and later grew interest in wider European movements like Nouveau réalisme and the Nuclear movement.

Art pushes Francesco to frequently travel, alas, another great passion, and resulted in the meeting of his wife Sveva. Sveva’s background is in Art History with the Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, and her thesis explored specific movie types which can be transformed in artworks, and thereby enter into the museum. Following various internships in contemporary galleries in Naples and Brussels, Sveva started to work at Laveronica arte contemporanea, becoming a partner in 2016. The gallery focuses its research on the human condition, through politically and socially oriented art. Through the artists’ projects, the program itself creates a strong link with the local community and gives the gallery the possibility to exit the white cube and to actively enter the public space.

Collezione Taurisano haven’t been stopped by our pandemic, continuing to engage with their artists and the art world at large, responding with a strong push via an Instagram live discussion series, We Care. The talks have been documented on their IGTV, making for a great resource. Later today (Thursday May 7) at 5pm CEST, Sveva will be talking with collection artist, Débora Delmar, who we had the pleasure to interview back in 2015.

In this debut Online Exhibition of Collezione Taurisano on IC, following are in situ images from around the Taurisano’s home, individual artworks, as well as documentation from a special at-home-performance by transdisciplinary art collective, Apparatus 22. Because Of Many Suns, is the title devised by Apparatus 22 for the acquisition award initiated by Collezione Taurisano.