One year after establishing their personal foundation—created to share their extensive collection of contemporary art with the public—Mr. and Mrs. Bonollo have entrusted Chiara Nuzzi and Elisa Carollo with the curation of the summer program.
There are few truly enlightened collectors in the world, and Sandra and Giancarlo Bonollo are certainly among this select group. For them, acquiring and owning art is neither a whim nor a vanity project, but a mission. The artists they encounter and come to admire—with their visions, insights, and material interpretations—serve as lenses through which they view the contemporary world, revealing its often-imperceptible details and confronting its darker aspects. A long-time collector of post-war art, Giancarlo Bonollo first approached contemporary art at the suggestion of his wife Sandra, who at the time was still unfamiliar with the world of collecting but deeply fascinated by the many facets of artistic creation. Since then, they have acquired more than 500 works, ranging from sculpture to painting, video art to photography. Sandra speaks of her husband’s passion with a mix of tenderness, pride, and ironic exasperation: over the years, their home has become something of a museum—where art is neither mere decoration nor an untouchable fetish, but an integral part of everyday life.
THE FOUNDATION IS HOUSED IN A FORMER RELIGIOUS COMPLEX IN THIENE, NORTHERN ITALY
At a certain point, the collection had grown so vast that not even two storage units and their holiday home were enough to contain it. Moreover, the Bonollos had always harbored the desire to make their collection accessible and to provide it with a worthy home. And so, in 2024, the Sandra and Giancarlo Bonollo Foundation for Contemporary Art was officially inaugurated in the small town of Thiene, in the province of Vicenza, just a few kilometers from their hometown. The foundation is housed in the former Chiesa delle Dimesse complex and extends from the interiors of the deconsecrated church to a selection of spaces in the adjoining 18th-century palazzo, which recently underwent a restoration project supported by Sandra and Giancarlo Bonollo under the direction of architect Giancarlo Zerbato. Alongside group exhibitions featuring works from the collection, the foundation also presents solo shows by emerging artists—both Italian and international—and offers a rich public program of talks, in-depth discussions, and guided tours designed for a wide range of audiences.
THE GROUP SHOW VIBRANT MATTER CURATED BY CHIARA NUZZI
The fourth exhibition dedicated to the collection (7 June – 7 November 2025) is conceived as a collective reflection on the relationship between art, nature, and ecology. As the title Vibrant Matter suggests, matter itself takes center stage: the eight artists selected by Chiara Nuzzi – such as Jesse Darling, Isabel Nuño de Buen and Luca Trevisani, among others – use sculpture across a range of scales as a means to spark reflection, foster debate, and imagine new possibilities for coexistence between humans and nature. Matter is no longer inert or passive; it becomes a generative force. The title is drawn from the eponymous essay by Jane Bennett, one of the leading voices in contemporary ecosophy, in which she shifts our attention from the human experience of things to the things themselves, opening political theory to the active participation of non-human forces in shaping events. Among the artists on view, Giulia Cenci presents one of her signature sculptures, which intertwines organic components with repurposed materials—perhaps offering a glimpse into a post-human future that resonates with Sandra Mujinga’s Belly up 1 (2019–2022). Giorgio Andreotta Calò, known for his “active residues” of consumed processes and actions—where the dimensions of past and future continuously intertwine—contributes Clessidra (2019): a Venetian bricola (a mooring post) eroded at its center by water, which he has cast in bronze, preserving it forever in time and space. In Markings of Buried Gold (2017), South African artist Bronwyn Katz brings into sharp focus the tragic aspects of her country’s history—scarred by the greed and recklessness of Western exploitation of land, people, and resources in the pursuit of gold. Finally, June Crespo addresses the human body as an intertwining of biological elements, collective and personal contexts, as well as physical environments and temporal coordinates.
SPEECH WEAVERS: PALOMA PROUDFOOT’S SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION FOR THE FORMER CHIESA DELLE DIMESSE
Fondazione Bonollo is reaffirming its commitment to promoting emerging art through solo exhibitions dedicated to the vision of young artists. Until August 30th, Thiene will offer the opportunity to delve into the poetics of Paloma Proudfoot, an English sculptor whose practice develops through ceramics in close dialogue with the environment and social constructs. For the former Church of the Dimesse, Proudfoot conceived the installation Speech Weavers — which also gives its title to the entire exhibition curated by Elisa Carollo. The work is the result of research and “listening,” a central theme throughout the exhibition. Inspired by the small church that would house the large sculpture — where nuns, until the last century, listened to mass from behind a metal grate — the artist created a kind of altarpiece that places the transformative power of sound as an active gesture of interconnection at the heart of the work. Sound, understood as the transmission of waves, is an intrinsically dynamic element that removes the act of listening from the dimension of passivity. As in all her previous research, Proudfoot imbues the work with a feminist component, reflecting on the act of listening as a trait typically considered feminine, and thus gendered.
Leaving the mystical atmosphere of the church, visitors enter the renovated rooms of the adjacent eighteenth-century palace, where Proudfoot’s practice unfolds in a series of bas-relief wall sculptures. These works propose a fluid vision of identity, developing through the interaction between the internal — anatomy — and the external — nature and the environment — in a continuous alchemical process. The works, which showcase a high level of detail and mastery of craftsmanship, enhance the fragility of the human body through the material chosen by the artist, ceramics, which she plans to enrich with new material experimentations in the near future.
LINK
- Ninety Percent of Everything: Interview with the curator Maria Pina Usai - October 2, 2026
- Christina Nakou: the fragility of matter as a metaphor for the human condition - July 3, 2026
- The Island: Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan - December 19, 2025
