The Academy of Fine Arts Gallery in Naples reopens

The Academy of Fine Arts of Naples reopens and returns to students, teachers, scholars and the entire city the Galleria dell'Accademia di Napoli (GAN), completely renovated in its layout and layout.

Yesterday the inauguration in the presence of the mayor of Naples, Gaetano Manfredi. The long restoration work was carried out with the advice and under the high supervision of the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape and was carried out, despite the difficulties due to the pandemic period, with the aim of highlighting the immense artistic heritage of the Academy.

"After four years the Gallery finally reopens with a new exhibition – said the president of the Academy, Rosita Marchese – and it is also an important reopening because after covid it is a sign of vitality. Ours is a predominantly laboratory Academy for which presence is important and therefore we start again".

The new installation, created by curators Federica De Rosa and Marco Di Capua, was also designed to present the Academy's immense heritage, only partially known, and long kept in storage.

A work that has therefore allowed a new location for a vast collection, historically belonging to the Academy, which has thus been re-established in its integrity also thanks to the restitution of masterpieces obtained from important city museums and increased by works given on loan for use by artists or heirs, thus updating the work of expansion and completion already begun in 2005.

"The Gallery will be open to Academy students and scholars for the time being. – explained the director Renato Lori – but we are organizing ourselves so that it can be opened, as soon as possible, also to the public because if it is unquestionable that the main purpose of the Academy is training, we must also carry out a function of cultural and artistic diffusion considering that we are located in the center of a pole of the city where the Mann, the Galleria Principe, the Bellini theater and the Conservatori insisto ".

The new arrangement and layout of the Gallery includes the placement in the rooms of approximately 300 works including drawings, sculptures, paintings, photographs and installations dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, many of which have been subject to restoration, ordinary and extraordinary maintenance by the Academy's Restoration School.

According to the curators' wishes, the Gallery retraces the rich history of Neapolitan art through chronological, thematic, genre and school paths, through a series of highly evocative rooms such as the one that introduces the Museum with portraits of the protagonists or the one dedicated to the historical formation of the Academy, rehabilitating entire phases such as the early 900s and the Thirties.

The new Gallery, with the installation by Lucio Turchetta and the visual design by Enrica D'Aguanno, has the aim of ”defend the sense of identity of the collections and present the history of the Academy itself and its evolution over time and gives life to an intense collective narration, marked by the times, themes, style and personality of each individual author".

One wing of the Gallery, 'Spazio Lae Vergine', was conceived as a free area exclusively dedicated to the planning of temporary exhibitions, debates and presentations with the aim of ”to further strengthen the action that the Academy intends to exercise on the Italian art scene as a great laboratory and active centre of research, study, documentation and culture".