From May 18th to 21st, 2023, the newly formed Associazione delle Gallerie d’Arte di Lugano (GAL) is organizing an unprecedented sculpture exhibition in the spaces of the Asilo Ciani.
The exhibition “Sulla scultura: dal materiale all’immateriale. Arte fra XX e XXI secolo” is the first exhibition event promoted by GAL – Associazione delle Gallerie d’Arte di Lugano, the professional association born with the aim of disseminating and making accessible to the public the cultural contents derived from the experiences of its members, contributing to spread the idea that they do not only carry out a commercial activity, but are real cultural spaces curated by expert enthusiasts.
GAL makes its debut with a broad-ranging exhibition that traces the history of sculpture techniques from the 20th century to the present day, presenting works by Tonatiuh Ambrosetti, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Rangga Aputra, Francesco Balilla Pratella, John Cage, Tony Cragg, Luca Frei, Alberto Garutti, Bruno Munari, Ruben Pang, Flavio Paolucci, Matteo Pugliese, Luigi Russolo, Paolo Scirpa, Vera Trachsel, and Ronald Ventura.
Thanks to the collaboration with the City of Lugano and the support of Lugano Region, the city’s galleries will be on display from May 18th to 21st, 2023 at the Asilo Ciani, a historic late 19th-century building that has recently been restored.

Founded in January 2023, the GAL Association brings together the art galleries of Lugano that have been operating in the sector for years and that are an integral part of the city’s cultural fabric. Each with its own history and professional background, these galleries have shared the project of working together, creating a dynamic and virtuous network for the territory.
The participating galleries in the exhibition are Galleria Daniele Agostini, Buchmann Lugano, Studio Dabbeni, Imago Art Gallery, KROMYA Art Gallery, Primo Marella Gallery, Galleria Allegra Ravizza, and Repetto Gallery. Through about ten sections, the exhibition is a path on sculptural language’s technical, stylistic, and conceptual evolution, exploring the processes, materials, and new relationships with space implemented between the 20th and 21st centuries. The history of contemporary sculpture has in fact followed a complex trajectory, marked by radical ruptures that have initiated new research directions: transformations that have characterized the extraordinary and vital parable of plastic art in its most eclectic creative potential.

For many centuries, sculpture had a precise and circumscribed identity, but with the progress of industry and technology, the way of conceiving and realizing it has changed, triggering an era open to the maximum freedom of transgression and the legitimation of new practices, fundamental elements of contemporary action. Among unexplored languages and expressive modalities that take up and update traditional practices, the exhibition at the Asilo Ciani brings together some of the most relevant figures in the sculptural panorama of the last century, artists who have interpreted matter in a thousand facets, pushing beyond the boundaries of its very presence.
Artphilein, a bookstore and publishing house specializing in contemporary photography and independent publishing, has curated a section of the exhibition in which a selection of photobooks and artist’s books on the theme of exploring unusual and border lands is presented. The material is exhibited inside the Cubitus installation created in 2005 by Luca Frei, which reproduces the Bibliotèque des Enfants of the Centre George Pompidou at the beginning of the 1980s.