This year the Golf Club Lugano celebrates its centenary. It was in fact built in 1923 by Erwin von Riedermann, as a gesture of love towards his wife Josefa, a keen golfer. Surrounded by a beautiful pre-Alpine landscape, the eighteen-hole course winds its way along the Magliasina River on flat terrain, through birch, oak, pine, beech, rhododendron, oleander and azalea forests.
As part of the programme of events and initiatives promoted for the centenary, the Lugano Golf Club involved MUSEC to set up an exhibition of sculptures by 20th-century Italian masters in the golf course area, including the names Francesco Messina, Luciano Minguzzi and Giacomo Manzù.
MASTERPIECES EN PLEIN AIR. Twentieth-Century Italian Sculpture. Works from the Loi Collection presents nine works of high artistic intensity and quality distributed along the playground that is transformed for the occasion into an artistic trail of surprising uniqueness. The nine sculptures, predominantly in bronze, come from the Loi Collection and were selected by MUSEC both for the quality of their sculptural technique and for the range of sentiments expressed, which characterised the research of 20th century masters. Their placement on the course seeks full harmony with the landscape that frames them. Each work is accompanied by a short critical statement and a poetic passage, written by great names in 20th century Italian literature. The open-air exhibition is completed by a notebook published by the Culture and Museums Foundation of Lugano (Capolavori en plein air. Italian 20th century sculpture. Works from the Loi Collection, edited by Nora Segreto).
From 7 June to 29 October 2023 the exhibition can be visited by appointment, by calling +41(0)916061557.
The collector – Nicola Loi was born in 1942 in Sardinia, but soon moved to Rome and then Turin. He frequented the art world since the 1960s and from 1967 turned his passion into a full-time job: he organised exhibitions, presented paintings and sculptures and produced editions of art engravings. From the beginning, he was attracted to sculpture and, when he founded the ‘La Colomba’ gallery in Turin in 1974, he was the first in Italy to focus on sculpture. In 1986, he founded ‘Studio Copernico’ in Milan, which privileged the relationship with the artists he followed, taking care of their image and publications, organising events and selling their works. In 2003, he became a member of the newly established ‘Fondazione Francesco Messina’ and in 2006 he created ‘Materima’ in Casalbeltrame (Novara), a true sculpture city.
The artists on show: Piergiorgio Colombara (b. 1948); Paolo Delle Monache (b. 1969); Maïmouna Guerresi (b. 1951); Giacomo Manzù (b. 1908-1991); Giuseppe Maraniello (b. 1945); Francesco Messina (b. 1900-1995); Luciano Minguzzi (b. 1911-2004); Augusto Perez (b. 1929-2000); Giuseppe Spagnulo (b. 1936-2016).
