The New Fondazione Prada Is the Contemporary Art Museum Italy Has Long Deserved

How is it that Milan, Italy’s modern metropolis, has never had a contemporary art museum? It is curious for a country with an omnipresent and encompassing arts tradition, one of the oldest in European history, that somehow the government has never erected an institution worthy of its rich postwar and contemporary holdings. Rome only opened its first pair, the MAXXI and MACRO, in 2010. (They received underwhelming reviews.) But now, thanks to Miuccia Prada, the situation has changed entirely. Unveiled to the public today, the permanent home of Fondazione Prada holds the fashion scion’s vast collection, which spans the 20th century with a heavy emphasis on Italian art but also on bold-faced practitioners in the current international market. The compound, located in Milan’s industrial zone Largo Isarco, is as magnificent as its collection. And that’s saying a lot.

Famously, Prada has never quite disclosed the particulars of her collection—just how many pieces are in it and even the names of the artists whose work she acquires. Rather, at certain moments she has lent her holdings out to other institutions, or hung temporary exhibitions filled with loans from other’s collections—and a few teases from her own—in her foundation’s Venetian palazzo. Now, however, a 1910 distillery complex has been converted into 12,000 square meters of exhibition halls for her gems to finally come out on display. The foundation maintains a curatorial team headed by Arte Povera founder Germano Celant, and the curation of the exhibitions at the museum will rotate amongst this elite circle.

Prada, in her ever-intellectual style, enlisted museum-design favorite Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) to undertake the challenge to entirely rethink what a contemporary museum and its galleries should look like. In essence, both Prada and Koolhaas were eager to not only reimagine the gallery-going experience—the “predictable conditions,” as the museum’s materials call it—but also push curators and artists in their approach to utilizing the space. 

Nine differing spaces within the compound offer a range of sizes, scales, and flexibility. Some of the spaces remain raw, others manipulated. There’s even a haunted house with a gold-leaf exterior, and a mirrored cinema building with moveable walls, so screens can be turned outwards for courtyard screenings. There’s the Cisterna, the former storage cellar for the distillery’s whiskey and brandy barrels, which has retained its cool underground feel but has been opened up with glass walls that reveal the courtyard. An interior balcony allows those on higher levels to peer down into the exhibitions below. Wes Anderson has even designed a bar for the space, one that would have been right at home in the “Grand Budapest Hotel.” Each building within the complex has a different height, with scattered sight lines keeping the eye engaged at every perspective.

The museum opens with seven shows. Solo efforts from Roman Polanski and Thomas Demand screen in the cinema, while Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois are fittingly installed in the Haunted House—named for its supposed spectral inhabitants. In the Nord (north) building, which kept its original terracotta-colored walls, a show curated by Nicholas Cullinan titled “In Part,” taken solely from Prada’s holdings, features works mostly by Italian post-war heroes—Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giulio Paolini, Domenico Gnoli, Pino Pascali—though the idea originated from a photo that Robert Rauschenberg took of Cy Twombly in 1952. The works all feature body parts, often dismembered or void of complete identity.

The central pavilion, known as the Podium, features “Serial Classic.” Curated by archeologist Salvatore Settis, it is one of the sexiest displays of Roman copies of Greco sculpture ever seen. Contrasted against stark fluorescent lights and stanchions of varying heights, the ripped musculature of these Adonises is presented in multiples as if a chorus. The show bridges the gap between Classical perfection and contemporary seriality. 

Finally, in the Sud (south) and Deposito (warehouse) sections resides an introduction to Prada’s personal holdings, including the Barnett Newman painting Onement VI, for which she supposedly paid $43.8 million, as well as a series of artist-designed cars, including Walter de Maria’s Cadillacs. While there is still a yet-to-be-completed tower in the works, hopefully finished by 2017, the new Fondazione Prada finally is the modern art museum that Milan—no, Italy—deserves. Re-route that trip from Venice; it’s worth bracing the Italian train system just to experience this feat of architecture, gallery design, and of course, collecting prowess.