Pirelli Hanga Bicocca

 A great highlight of the trip to Milan was our visit to the Pirelli Hanga Bicocca exhibition space. See here

It is an in an old industrial complex in an industrial neighbourhood. The huge hangar that was used to test massive turbines has been transformed into three spacious galleries.

The permanent installation The seven heavenly palaces by Anselm Kiefer was the reason for s going. He is probably one of very favourite artists, and we were very keen to see this work.  It is based on Jewish philosophy about the stages that must be gone through to reach the a transformative state. The work is very evocative; the scale and materials together create a haunting and unsettling response.

It is impossible to summarise accurately the philosophy behind this work. 

If anyone is interested, I suggest downloading the Google Arts and Culture app, and finding the Pirelli Hangar Bococca site - there is a great summary there,

In fact this app is fantastic - we ran out of time nd energy to visit every gallery in Milan (the hot days were draining!) but we were able to 'visit' the Sforza Castle collection, The Museum of Modern art  and many others from the comfort of our apartment. It is a great resource for armchair gallery visiting.

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There were also 5 of Kiefer's large works on canvas on display

The photo below gives some idea of the size of the work... those tiny shapes are people

There were two other exhibitions in two other vast galleries.

Photo below indicates the size of one of the second exhibition spaces.

This is the work of Gian Maria Tosatti entitled Here/Now