The Museo Bertozzi & Casoni is the new museum of ceramic sculpture in contemporary art promoted by System Group. A place you don't expect to find incredible masterpieces of glazed ceramic. 

Our story takes us to the characteristic streets in the historic center of Sassuolo, a small town located between the provinces of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy. This place is a famous industrial district linked to the production of ceramic tiles, but it also has an important historical heritage encompassing palaces, gardens and dwellings belonging to bygone eras.

A short distance from the majestic Palazzo Ducale there is the Cavallerizza Ducale, an extraordinary work of art that enchants us with its charm and its skillfully restored architecture, in which the spirit of the past coexists with the modern world.

The Cavellerizza Ducale was built between 1781 and 1788 on the orders of Duke Ercole Rinaldo III in order to rectify lack of stables and accommodation for the Ducal Dragoons that followed the Estense Court when it moved to the Ducal Palace residence of Sassuolo. 

This building, which in the past formed part of the “Estense Delight” together with the Ducal Palace of Sassuolo, today hosts the first museum dedicated to ceramics in contemporary art: the Museo Bertozzi e Casoni.

The museum brings together the most famous works of the artists that have been exhibited at international level, including the Tate Liverpool, the Sperone Westwater in New York, the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Biennale in Venice, the Palazzo Te in Mantua and the Expo 2015 in Milan.

The project is the brainchild of Franco Stefani, the chairman of System, one of the most important player in industrial automation who has decided to provide his home town Sassuolo with an extraordinary one-of-a-kind museum  paying particular attention to art knowledge and heritage. 

The artists Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni come from Imola and had prestigious artistic training, from the school in Faenza to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Their interests are focused on a dialogue with the great artistic tradition, cultivating an original vocation for experimentation in the sculptural field and seeing in the ceramic material a possibility for “painted sculpture”.

Bertozzi & Casoni have been exploring the different forms of waste of contemporary society, without excluding cultural and artistic waste, in a production in which fantastic imagination and technical precision, figuration and abstraction, history and contemporaneity, degradation and beauty all form a part.

It is an original and unique exhibition of its kind, at times surreal, but with the ability to put on display objects and animals that seem real, alive, such is the perfection of every single detail. 

It is an unmissable opportunity to understand how a material such as ceramics, so familiar to us in our day-to-day lives, can transform into a work of contemporary art, inside a building which recalls the glories of a distant past and which is sublime example of Italian architecture from the 18th century.

The exhibition is open to the public and admission is free. You can visit it from Friday to Sunday from 03.00 pm to 07.30 pm.

All images © System Group

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