Mario Nanni Virgola

Mario Nanni opened in Bologna a new space for light, a place charged with ever-changing contents: a home, a museum, a gallery, a library, an artist residence, a coffee shop, a school.

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From a line, a sweeping gesture, made of breath and open border, a new philosophy of thought comes to life. The new path of the master of light comes from the renaissance workshop.

Always faithful to the principle of know how, to the poetics of design, to his grandfather’s lesson who used to tell that the world is made up of talking men and making man and that one must decide quickly to choose sides, Mario Nanni gives life to a place full and charged with ever-changing contents: a home, a museum, a gallery, a library, an artist residence, a coffee shop, a school.

Mario Nanni Virgola is this and much more: it is what people who are living there will make of it. A place to generate a “know how culture”, to learn a trade seeing first-hand the work of the great masters of art, architecture, photography, design, fashion. Mario Nanni opens his house to the town, a eighteenth-century building of fine workmanship, limited by authority responsible for the historical buildings, illuminating what has been in the shadow for a long time, that’s what Virgola is about: a breath, a gesture which starts a new reflection through that light penetrating it.

On the occasion of Artefiera 2016, Virgola opens with the Mario Nanni’s personal exhibition which bears the same name given to the space: behind that sign one can see a whole world. The exhibition collects a series of works created by Mario Nanni over the years, works where light interfaces, dialogues and finally merges with matter.

Thanks to a unique exhibition language, Via Santo Stefano 94 is meant to be a love act for any kind of light, from the artificial led one to the solar one, with the great passion showed in half century of observing it, design it and tell it. A long study between pause, reflection and dynamism; an ideal, ever-changing space where the artisan experience, the knowledge of the subject, the design culture can pass down and develop from generation to generation. The home of the master where dreams become matter, where the design experience becomes incarnate in a path from the thought to the object, from the intuition to the work; the home is light at work.

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Mario Nanni Virgola, Bologna

Mario Nanni Virgola, Bologna

Mario Nanni Virgola, Bologna

Mario Nanni Virgola, Bologna

Mario Nanni Virgola
via Santo Stefano 94, Bologna
Design: Mario Nanni

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