Where is the National Gallery?

The Gallery is located in Logge dei Volontari, a magnificent building constructed in the late 1930s and renovated for the occasion. Getting there is very easy because it is positioned right in the Old Town of San Marino.

What is housed within?

Inside are the works of modern and contemporary artworks from the State’s Permanent Collection, acquired from the post-World War II period to the present day. The Museum is notable for its Performative Archive, a central space for contemporary art in San Marino, where documents of the works in the Collection, cultural and artistic events of San Marino, portfolios of San Marino artists, and artist books are displayed and available.
The new set-up is a tribute to the conference “Art: Utopia or Regression?” held at the Teatro Titano in San Marino from 7 to 9 June 1991, curated by Lea Vergine.

The exhibit is divided into four sections:

Considerations on Color

The first room is dedicated to the languages of color. It features abstract and sign-based paintings by Italian and San Marino artists, including Emilio Vedova’s Foresta Vergine. Dal diario del Brasile and Marina Busignani Reffi’s Vita embrionale, as well as the spatial articulation of Achille Perilli’s sculpture. It also includes American artworks by James Brown and David Row, where color takes on analytical, flat characteristics influenced by Pop Art and conceptual art.

Plots and Images

The second room features Difesa della Natura, a famous plot by Joseph Beuys, documented by Bubi Durini. It also showcases a powerful photograph by Shirin Neshat juxtaposing childhood and violence in Iran’s troubled history. Finally, there is a work by San Marino artist Martina Conti, created for San Marino's participation in the 2019 Biennale di Venezia, which features San Marino parliamentarians engaged in exercises of listening to their own bodies in the official seat of the Great and General Council, promoting closeness between politics and community.

Postmodern Icons

The third section includes Enzo Mari’s iconic and monumental installation Dialogo tra Fidia, Galileo, Duchamp, i sette nani e l’Idiota from 1986, along with works by Philip Taaffe and Tino Stefanoni that humorously and communicatively rework the “Tower,” a symbol of San Marino, both as a herald and as a geographical and landscape feature. Enzo Cucchi’s artist book is also displayed to document the site-specific intervention Scala Santa in the former monastery of Santa Chiara, now the University.

Plural Identities

The final section features two recently acquired works produced for the XIX Biennale del Mediterraneo, hosted by the National Gallery of San Marino in 2021.
Binta Diaw’s Black Powerless, a sculpture exploring identity issues, and Jacopo Rinaldi’s work, which retrieves photographs taken by Gaetano Bresci, a young anarchist known for assassinating King Umberto I of Italy, from Museo Storico dell'Arma dei Carabinieri in Rome. The artist raises many questions: What traces of history do we preserve? Is this the work of an artist, or are these forgotten historical documents?