curated by Elena Forin
25 July – 23 August 2026
The V edition of Nucré | Rassegna d'arte contemporanea, entitled "Quasi maturi" and curated by Elena Forin, pays tribute to nature and its fruits. Growth, ripening, natural and cosmic cycles, attachment and decay are just some of the experiences the exhibition evokes on an emotional journey. How does one achieve an ideal state of growth? And how do time, collective values and economic dynamics affect a product's appeal?
Nowadays, aesthetic perfection often takes priority on overall quality. Quasi Maturi (Almost Ripe) chooses fruit, crops and food as metaphors to explore broader themes, seeking within the vagueness and imperfection of the term ‘almost’ that variable through which aspects often overlooked, secondary or hidden, yet also urgent and crucial to defining our times, come to the fore.
The exhibition, which features Italian and international artists from different generations, draws inspiration, as always, from the territory of Ceglie Messapica. Consider the wonderful vegetable gardens, once an integral part of many houses in the village; and the Norman castle itself, surrounded at the rear by a large, lush garden—now private—which, visible from the main floor, forms a setting of extraordinary beauty characterised by a variety of plant species. The town’s reach, however, extends far beyond the historic centre alone, which still maintains a close connection with the world of farming in the neighbouring countryside. The bond between Ceglie and its countryside is rooted in the history of the families who have always lived there and who, despite the changes of time, continue to move between one setting and another.
To evoke this journey, Quasi Maturi takes place across three venues, leading the public from the Ducal Castle to the Cibus Restaurant in the historic centre, and on to Trullo Rubina in Contrada Menzella, in the heart of the Ceglie countryside.
The artists involved explore the theme not only in its organic and existential sense of growth, but also in terms of the ecosystem and market built around this element. In an exhibition path that moves between city and countryside, the fruit thus becomes the subject of analysis relating to its economic and existential dimensions, encompassing environmental, social, cultural and collective dynamics.
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Photos by Marino Colucci
Alejandro Almanza Pereda
A Glass of Fruit is part of the artist’s Underwater Photography and Video Projects, through which he explores the qualities and behavior of objects in the absence of gravity and the artistic potential this condition entails. Drawing on the Flemish vanitas tradition and, more broadly, the European still-life painting tradition, the artist creates scenes that verge on the impossible or the absurd, highlighting our emotional relationship with objects and the cultural memory they evoke. The work references a painting by Caravaggio, a pioneer of a new perspective on objects depicted at tabletop level. Working with the constraints of gravity and the sculptural possibilities of water, Almanza Pereda chose to photograph and film his still lifes underwater, playfully manipulating perspective. We encounter a double scene divided by a pane of glass, where various objects and fruits simultaneously float and sink. These works – apparently unstable, immaterial, or on the brink of disaster – are governed by a singular and unsettling logic that foregrounds our affective relationship with objects and the cultural memories they carry (from the artist’s website). Selected for its poignant poetic quality, the work serves as a connecting thread to the investigation of still life developed across the four exhibition venues of the project. Through its elegant evocation of fragility and potential collapse, it demonstrates how this traditional genre continues to generate distinctly contemporary visions, entrusting objects with a role that extends far beyond mere representation.
Gianfranco Baruchello
Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 – Rome, 2023) lived and worked in Rome and Paris. Throughout his long artistic career, he explored and engaged with the major trends of the post-war period, from Pop Art to Conceptual Art. From the late 1950s onwards, he worked across various media: painting, film, installation, objects, sculpture and performance art. His first solo exhibition took place in 1963 at the La Tartaruga gallery in Rome: large canvases and small objects focused on the idea of formulating an alphabet of images which he called Bisogno (translated from The Need), Paura, Energia, Errore, Entità Ostile, etc. In 1964, for the exhibition at the Cordier & Ekstrom gallery in New York, he exhibited works that marked a significant milestone in his research: fragmentation, the scattering across the canvas of images reduced to minimal elements, and the conceptual decentralisation of space. From 1960 onwards, he began producing short films, including Il grado zero del paesaggio (1963) and Verifica incerta (1964–1965). Baruchello applied the very concept of fragmentation and montage to his experimentation with painting, sculpture and moving images. During the same period, he produced artist’s books, including La quindicesima riga (lines of text taken from hundreds of books) and the book Avventure nell’armadio di plexiglass. In 1962, he met Marcel Duchamp, to whom he dedicated the volume Why Duchamp in 1985, published by McPherson, New York. In 1973, he launched the Agricola Cornelia S.p.A. project, an experiment at the intersection of art and agriculture, which occupied him for eight years. In 1998, he established the Baruchello Foundation with Carla Subrizi. He has participated on several occasions in the Venice Biennale (1976–80, 1988–90, 1993, 2013) and Documenta in Kassel (1977, 2012). Baruchello’s works are held in museum collections around the world: the National Gallery of Modern Art and MAXXI (Rome), MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), as well as in Barcelona, Munich, Hamburg, London and Paris.
Achille Funi
Angelo Filomeno
Angelo Filomeno (San Michele Salentino, 1963) lives and works in New York. His formation has deep roots in his Apulian childhood – where he watched his mother at the sewing machine for hours – and developed further in Milan, where he worked for fashion houses including Mila Schön and Versace, honing an exceptional technical mastery, before moving to New York, where he collaborated with theatrical costume ateliers and Oscar de la Renta until, at the turn of the millennium, he committed fully to his artistic practice. His defining medium is embroidery: needle and thread on fine silks, velvet, shantung, muslin and even burlap, with which he constructs hyperrealist and dreamlike compositions in which skulls, insects, skeletons and surreal figures coexist with crystals and onyx set into the fabric. His imagery is visionary and draws on vanitas, alchemy and the art history of Northern Europe – Grünewald, Dürer, Bosch – as well as Japanese mythologies and African tribal masks, all transfigured into a realm of extraordinary elegance through the sheer beauty of the embroidery itself. His works are held in major international public collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Rome. He participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and ARS 06 at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and has held solo exhibitions at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville and the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, among others.
Achille Funi (Ferrara, 1890 – Appiano Gentile, 1972) was a painter, sculptor, illustrator and set designer, and one of the most eclectic and significant figures in Italian art of the first half of the 20th century. Trained at the Dosso Dossi Municipal Art School in Ferrara and later at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts – where he graduated in 1910 under the tutelage of Cesare Tallone – he soon came into contact with the Milanese Futurist group, participating in 1914 in the Nuove Tendenze exhibition at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan. Although he moved within the orbit of the movement, he developed a personal and unorthodox interpretation, paying greater attention to plastic and constructive values than to pure dynamism, so much so that he was described by Boccioni as “one of the greatest champions of Italian avant-garde painting” and at the same time described by the same artist as “deeply realistic”. In 1922, together with Sironi, Dudreville and others, he was among the founders of the Novecento group, promoted by Margherita Sarfatti, which directed its artistic exploration towards a revival of the classical Italian tradition reinterpreted in the light of the century’s avant-garde movements. Female figures, still lifes and portraits became the favoured subjects of a style of painting that established an eclectic range of cultural references, with deep roots in the Renaissance tradition of Ferrara. The group made its national debut at the 1924 Venice Biennale, establishing itself as one of the most cohesive forces on the Italian art scene of the decade. From the 1930s onwards, his great talent for mural painting became apparent: he worked on the Milan Triennials, on the Arengo Hall of Ferrara’s Town Hall in collaboration with Felicita Frai, and on major religious and civic commissions, including San Giorgio Maggiore and the Palace of Justice in Milan, St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and the Church of St Francis in Tripoli. From 1939, he taught fresco painting at the Brera Academy, where he trained generations of artists, including Dario Fo and Valerio Adami, and later became director of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.
Ornella Cardillo
Considered a pioneer of geometric abstractionism, Melotti's style is based on abstract and at the same time figurative geometric creations, in which the influence of the two disciplines that formed him, music and engineering, can be seen. Constantly searching for new materials and creative possibilities, he has left behind a large number of works such as drawings, ceramics and his teatrini, fascinating terracotta compositions conceived as minute living spaces, within which the artist mimes situations of encounters, presences, alienated and absorbed life. He took part in numerous exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (1948, 1950, 1952, 1956, 1966, 1972, 1986, 1995). In the month of his death, he was awarded the Golden Lion in Memory during the 42nd Venice Biennale. The artist's works can be found in museums such as the MoMA in New York and the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.
Lisetta Carmi
Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924 - Cisternino, 2022) is considered one of the most significant figures in the Italian photography scene of the 20th Century, able to combine art and social commitment with a unique sensibility towards people and stories on the sidelines. Her search is conceived as a means of seeking truth, documenting marginalised and invisible realities, such as harbours workers and the transvestite community of Genoa. She travelled extensively, realising reportages in Latin America, Asia and various Italian regions, with a strong social and political commitment. The photographic artworks of Lisetta Carmi are shown at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Palazzo Ducale di Genova, Museo MAN di Nuoro, Gallerie d’Italia di Torino.
Flatform
Simone Carraro
After graduating in painting at the Academia of Fine Arts in Venice, he dedicated himself fully to his artistic production. He has taken part in many exhibitions and urban events on national and international scale. Carraro’s work is strongly influenced by the spaces and contexts he engages with. He’s particularly interested in the relationship between humans and environment, investigating the characteristics of the landscape and pop culture elements, translating them with his own allegoric code into figurative and sonorous shapes.
The visual arts and the musical performances are the expressive means through which Carraro brings together symbolic imagery and rhythmic figurations, reviving archaic words and questioning future scenarios.
Flatform is a collective artist based in Milan. Flatform's work moves along an ideal borderline, that of meaning, articulating the difference between possible and impossible, between movement and pose. An unstable balance between control and chance, between the predictable and the unexpected is the focal point of his work. Flatform's works have been exhibited in numerous museums and institutions
including Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, Wexner Center in Columbus, MAXXI in Rome, Fondazione Prada in Milan, EMPAC in Troy NY, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Argos in Brussels, Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Yerba Buena in San Francisco, Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, PAC in Milan. Flatform's films have been invited to major film festivals including Cannes' Quinzaine des Realisateurs, Venice International Film Festival, IFFR Rotterdam, BFI Film Festival London, LOOP Barcelona, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, Lo Schermo dell'Arte Florence, IFF Melbourne. Winner of the Italian Council in 2019 and 2024, his works have been awarded at numerous film festivals and one of them was nominated for an Academy Awards nomination in 2021 in the Documentary - short subject category.
Sonia Leimer
She studied architecture at the Accademia of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her artistic research investigates urban and cosmic spaces, exploring how places and objects, shaped from specific historical contexts, transform to make history and social changes tangible. Her works — sculptures, videos and installations — placing themselves between reality and imagination, leave enigmatic traces that invite ongoing reinterpretations. Over the course of her career, she has taught in Vienna and Zurich and collaborated with international institutions such as Cooper Union in New York. Among the awards received are the Italian Council Award (2018) and the Paul Flora-Preis (2011). Leimer has held numerous notable solo exhibitions at the Museion in Bolzano (2020/2021), Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna (2012), Salzburger Kunstverein (2010), Neuer Kunstverein Wien (2022), the MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro in Sardinia (2021) and the ISCP in New York (2019).
Marzia Migliora
Vettor Pisani
Was an eclectic and visionary artist, known for his research that combines art, theatre and esoteric philosophy. He debuted in 1970 in Rome with the personal “Maschile, femminile e androgino. Incesto e cannibalismo in Marcel Duchamp” at the La Salt Gallery, which marks the beginning of a path characterised from the use of artistic language as an instrument for search and quotation. His practice goes from painting to installations, to performance, with artworks that reflect on the labyrinth as metaphor for reality and on the relationship between light and darkness, knowledge and mystery. His work interweaves references to Rosicrucian doctrine, Freemasonry, and mythology, with a theatrical approach that blends irony and depth, reality and storytelling. Among his most significant series are Il Teatro di Edipo, Il Teatro della Sfinge, and Il Teatro di Cristallo, in which theatre becomes both an initiatory space and an existential metaphor. Pisani participated in numerous editions of the Venice Biennale from 1976 to 1995, as well as in the Rome Quadriennale, consolidating his presence on the international scene. His works are held in major institutions such as the Museo Madre in Naples and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.
Her artistic practice spans between photography, video, sound, performance, installation, and drawing, through which she explores memory as a tool for articulating the present and analysing labour as an expression of social participation. Recently she has embraced a multispecies approach to create new sensitive relations, imagining how things might appear from animals and plants’ perspective, investigating the existing relationships between the environment and human beings. The artist’s work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and in exhibition in Italy and abroad, including at: Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice (2017); Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (2012); MAXXI, Rome (2012); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2011); and Fondazione Merz, Turin (2006). Her works are held in public and private collections in Italy and internationally, including: Museo Madre (Naples), Biedermann Museum (Donaueschingen), Castello di Rivoli Museum (Turin), Museo del Novecento (Milan), Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation (Turin), Fondazione Merz (Turin), and La Triennale (Milan).
Giuseppe Spagnulo
Giacomo Segantin
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona and completed the two-year Master’s programme in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Milan. His practice aims to deconstruct stereotypes linked to landscape and territorial identity, offering a vision of complex reality, constantly in flux. He has taken part in various residencies and research projects, including Mustarinda, Hyrynsalmi, Finland (2023); Uncivilized Paradigms, promoted by BJCEM, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi; progettoborca, Borca di Cadore, Dolomiti Contemporanee (2020); and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (2019). Her work has featured in several exhibitions, including We Are the Flood, curated by Stefano Cagol, Spazio Archeologico Sotterraneo, Trento (2022); Cantica21, a production award supported by MAECI and MiC, Canada (2021); To See, To Know, To Play, curated by Eleonora Reffo, Villa Borromeo, Fontaniva (2020); and 51zero, International Moving Image and Contemporary Art Festival, Rochester/Canterbury, UK (2019). In 2024, his work became part of the collection of MuSe Museum of Science in Trento, thanks to the PAC (Contemporary Art Plan, 2023 edition).
Was one of the leading figures in Italian sculpture in the second half of the twentieth century. After training between Faenza and Milan, where he worked as an assistant to Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana, his early works in stoneware, exhibited since 1965, soon evolved into monumental sculpture, using industrial materials such as iron and steel. In the 1970s he actively took part in the protest movements, creating urban installations in dialogue with working-class environments. His artistic research was rooted in material, gesture, and spatial tension, as highlighted in the Archeologia and Paesaggi series. He participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1972, 1976, 1982), Documenta in Kassel (1977), the Rome Quadriennale, and held solo museum exhibitions at the Museum Bochum, Neues Museum Nürnberg, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. His works are part of major museum collections, including MART in Rovereto, Museo del Novecento in Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe.
Driant Zeneli
He studied Sculpture and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata. He lives and works between Turin and Tirana. Over the course of his career, he has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in international institutions and biennials, including: the Venice Biennale (in 2011 and 2019); Sharjah Biennial (2025); Havana Biennial (2024); Ruhr Triennale, Essen (2024); Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) (2023); 59th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale (2022); Manifesta 14, Prishtina (2022); 39th EVA International Biennial, Limerick (2020); Autostrada Biennale, Prizren (2019); IV Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Chile (2015); and the 5th Prague Biennale (2011). His works have been exhibited in a wide range of museum contexts, including: EMST, Athens (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2024); MAXXI Museum, Rome (2023); National Gallery of North Macedonia (2022); Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2021); Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga (2019); National Gallery of the Republic of Kosovo, Pristina (2019); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bergamo (2019); MuCEM, Marseille (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Villa Medici, Rome (2016); GAM – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Turin (2013); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2012); MUSAC, Castilla y León, Spain (2012); and the National Gallery of Albania, Tirana (2008).
Michele Zaza
trained at the Art Institute in Bari and later at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he studied sculpture under the guidance of Marino Marini. His artistic research developed primarily through photography, with a conceptual approach that reflects on the human condition and power dynamics. Among his major bodies of work, Cristologia (1971) in which he documents the illusion of freedom between the individual and authority; Dissidenza ignota(1973), which explores themes of authoritarianism and everyday life through emotionally charged imagery; and Anamnesi, Universo estraneo, and Racconto celeste, which investigate the realm of dreams, the incorporeal, and domestic space as a celestial dimension.
His evolution towards more abstract and monumental forms became established in the 1990s, with works focusing on the face and sculptural forms inspired by Cycladic art, while maintaining an intense expressive style. Among his most important exhibitions are his participation in Documenta in Kassel (1977, 1982), the Venice Biennale with a solo room (1980), and exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1981). His works are held in prominent international museums, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as in significant public and private collections across Italy, Europe, and the United States.