To complement its 18th century Venetian venue, Fondazione Prada will open a new exhibition space in Milan on 9th May. The massive 205,000 ft2 building in Largo Isarco has been conceived by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture firm OMA, but arguably its biggest calling card is the bar, which has been designed by director Wes Anderson (who has worked on short films for Prada before) in the style of old Milanese cafes.
To celebrate the opening, sculptors Robert Gober and Thomas Demand will realise site-specific installations in dialogue with the industrial architecture and filmmaker Roman Polanski will explore the cinematographic inspirations behind his artistic vision through a new documentary and a series of film screenings.
From May, both locations will be thematically linked by two ancient art exhibitions devised by Salvatore Settis, entitled Serial Classic (9 May-24 August in Milan) and Portable Classic (9 May-13 September in Venice), which will analyse the themes of seriality and the copy in classical art and the reproduction of small-scale Greek and Roman sculptures from the Renaissance to Neoclassicism, respectively.
