Archeology now: Damien Hirst at Galleria Borghese

Archeology now's curators set up a story between past and present in which the visitor finds himself in front of sunken treasures (imagined by Hirst) combined with the wonderful forms of the Borghese collection.

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date and location: June 8th - November 7th, 2021, Galleria Borghese, Rome

At the Galleria Borghese today, and for the next few months, the viewer is confronted with one of the great dilemmas of contemporaneity, fake or real?

Over 80 works from Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable series will be displayed throughout the museum alongside ancient masterpieces. The exhibition will feature both monumental and small scale sculptures made from materials such as bronze, Carrara marble and malachite. Hirst’s Colour Space paintings, exhibited for the first time in Italy, will also be presented together with the permanent collection, while his colossal sculpture, Hydra and Kali, will be displayed outdoors in the Giardino Segreto of the Uccelliera.

This project stems from one of Hirst’s most original projects of the last twenty years: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which was exhibited for the first time in 2017 in Venice at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. Here, he worked with a variety of materials – natural, technological, and precious – with exceptional technique and skill. Made from marble, bronze, coral, rock crystal, and semi-precious stones, and inserted among the masterpieces of the Galleria’s collection, these works celebrate the desire for variety held by the museum’s founder, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. His fantasy had been to go beyond categories, not only among the arts, but also those of fiction and reality.


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