Fondazione Prada Superintendent Germano Celant Dies at 79
The Fondazione Prada confirmed that its Artistic and Scientific Superintendent Germano Celant passed away this morning in Milan at age 79. The Italian art critic and curator was a close friend and collaborator of designer Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli, the CEO of Prada Group. Celant had lead the Milan contemporary art museum and cultural institution co-founded by Prada and Bertelli for more than a quarter century, since joining as Artistic Director in 1993. Celant’s cause of death was reportedly complications from COVID-19, as widely reported in the Italian media. He had been hospitalized at San Raffaele, one of the three Milan hospitals to which the Prada Group donated intensive care and resuscitation units last month.
Born in Genoa in 1940, Celant was a revered figure in the art world. He is considered the father of Arte Povera, an Italian avant-garde movement begun in the 1960s by artists working with found objects and other “poor materials” that included Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, and Jannis Kounellis (who was the subject of the final show Celant curated at the Fondazione Prada’s Venice branch last year). Celant served as Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from 1988–2008. Concurrently, he helped Prada and Bertelli launch Fondazione Prada, where he played an instrumental role in bringing the worlds of art and fashion closer together. “They were suspicious of me, and I was suspicious of fashion,” he said of the early years to The New York Times Magazine in 2008. “I wanted to make clear that if they were really serious and wanted to create a unique collection, they should think large-scale and do one-of-a-kind projects, which can’t be repeated.”
At Fondazione Prada, Celant’s vision was nothing if not expansive, featuring solo shows from some of the biggest names in contemporary art like Michael Heizer, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and Anish Kapoor. Under Celant’s direction the foundation also commissioned artists to do large-scale or otherwise ambitious works, perhaps the most famous example being Dan Flavin’s site-specific light tube installation for the nearby Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, which bathes the church in green, pink, blue, and golden ultraviolet light. And as co-artistic directors for the first Florence Biennale in 1996 Celant and Ingrid Sischy paired off designers and artists—Prada and Damien Hirst, Helmut Lang and Jenny Holzer, Gianni Versace and Roy Lichtenstein—for a series of projects that became a touchstone for art/fashion collaborations which are now ubiquitous in the industry.
Fondazione Prada shared Prada and Bertelli’s remembrances of Celant in a statement: “We are deeply saddened for the loss of a friend and traveling companion. Germano Celant was one of the central figures in the learning and research process that art has represented for us since the early times of the foundation. The many experiences and intense exchanges we have shared with him over the years have helped us rethink the meaning of culture in our present. Intellectual curiosity, respect for the work of artists, the seriousness of his curatorial practice are lessons that we consider essential for us and the younger generations.”
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