Against the backdrop of a splendid pre-Alpine landscape, the Lugano Golf Club course unfolds over eighteen holes, along the Magliasina river on flat land, among birch, oak, pine, beech, rhododendron, oleander and azalea woods.
And all this has been around for 100 years! The Lugano Golf Club was in fact built in 1923 by Erwin von Riedermann, as a gesture of love towards his wife Josefa, an avid golfer.
As part of the program of events and initiatives promoted for the centenary, the Lugano Golf Club involved the MUSEC – Museum of Cultures of Lugano to set up in the golf area, an exhibition of sculptures by Italian masters of the twentieth century, among which the names of Francesco Messina, Luciano Minguzzi and Giacomo Manzù stand out.
MASTERPIECES EN PLEIN AIR at the Lugano Golf Club
The Italian sculpture of the twentieth century is the protagonist, 9 works of great intensity and artistic quality, distributed along the game path which, for the occasion, becomes an artistic trail of surprising uniqueness. The nine sculptures, mainly in bronze, come from the Loi Collection and have been selected by MUSEC both for the quality of the sculptural technique and for the range of feelings expressed, which characterized the research of the twentieth century masters.
Their placement on the playing field seeks full harmony with the landscape that frames them. Each work is accompanied by a brief critical profile and a poetic passage, inspired by the work itself, written by great names in twentieth-century Italian literature.
The open-air exhibition is completed by a notebook published by the Lugano Culture and Museum Foundation (Masterpieces en plein air. Italian sculpture of the twentieth century. Works from the Loi Collection, edited by Nora Segreto). The works will be in the field until 29 October 2023.
From 7 June visits by appointment only. Tel. 0041916061557
The artists on display at the Golf Club Lugano
- Piergiorgio Colombara (b. 1948);
- Paolo Delle Monache (b. 1969);
- Maïmouna Guerresi (b. 1951);
- Giacomo Manzu (1908-1991);
- Giuseppe Maraniello (b. 1945);
- Francesco Messina (1900-1995);
- Luciano Minguzzi (1911-2004);
- Augusto Perez (1929-2000);
- Giuseppe Spagnulo (1936-2016).
The collector
Nicola Loi was born in 1942 in Sardinia, but soon moved to Rome and then to Turin. He has been involved in the artistic environment since the 1967s and from 1974 he transforms his passion into a full-time job: he organizes exhibitions, proposes paintings and sculptures and produces editions of art engravings. From the beginning he was attracted to sculpture and, when he founded the «La Colomba» gallery in Turin in 1986, he was the first in Italy to deal mainly with sculpture. In 2003 he founded the "Studio Copernico" in Milan which favors the relationship with the artists he follows, takes care of their image and publications, organizes events and markets their works. In 2006 he became a member of the newly established Francesco Messina Foundation and in XNUMX he created in Casalbeltrame (Novara) «Materima», a veritable city of sculpture.
