Five contemporary art galleries – Santo Ficara, Il Ponte, Frittelli, Tornabuoni, and Armanda Gori – are simultaneously presenting PentaChiari, an exhibition celebrating the work of Giuseppe Chiari, beginning on Dec. 2.
Each gallery exhibits a particular phase of Chiari’s work, allowing visitors to see the entire repertoire of one of the most acclaimed artists that our city gave the world.
Born on Sept. 26, 1926, Chiari studied piano and music composition alongside mathematics and engineering in Florence.
In 1961, he experimented in visual music converting sound into visual forms. In the same period he joined the Fluxus group, an international and interdisciplinary group of artists, composers, designers and poets that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s and generated new art forms through different media and disciplines.
Chiari later identified as an artist-composer-philosopher and became known in Europe for his contributions to music, performance, painting and sculpture, artistic theory, art aesthetic, and in particular for what he referred to as “action music,” a type of music made of sounds originating from water, dry leaves, stones, etc. His work “Giocare con l’acqua e dire la parola acqua” (“Playing with water and saying the word water”) is renown for the transformation of script into an aesthetic object and the clarity and rigour of the texts that foreshadows later conceptual art.
Chiari also experimented with different visual mediums such as painting-collages, sheet music, and photographs.
Galleria Santo Ficara
Via Ghibellina, 164r
Dec. 2 – Feb. 2
Monday – Friday
10 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., 4 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Galleria Il Ponte
Via di Mezzo 42
Dec. 2 – Feb. 2
Monday –-Friday
3:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Frittelli Arte Contemporanea
Via Val di Marina 15
Dec. 2 – Mar. 2
Monday – Friday
10 a.m. –-1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Tornabuoni Arte
Lungarno Benvenuto Cellini 3
Dec. 2 – Jan. 27
Monday – Friday
10 a.m. – 1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Saturday 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Armanda Gori Arte
Viale della Repubblica n. 64-66-68, Prato
Dec. 2 – Jan. 28
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
4 p.m. – 8 p.m.