From Carla Accardi to Jannis Kounellis, from Mario Schifano to Luigi Ghirri, from Luciano Fabro to Claudio Parmiggiani, a journey through the history of Italian art in recent decades, focusing on iconic works, large installations made in the years of maturity, works that can be defined "without margin", to paraphrase the title of the avant-garde magazine by Alberto Boatto.
Conceived as a manual for the study of contemporary Italian art and as an in-depth tool, the volume is inspired by the tenth anniversary of the MAXXI and the recent acquisition of a group of works by some great masters that enrich the permanent collection of the museum: the Italian landscape as a sentimental geography according to the gaze of Ghirri, the invisible library full of books-symbol of Parmiggiani, Schifano’s reflection on the anesthetizing power of television - dated to the nineties, but more current -, the union of painting, symbolism and architectural structure in Accardi, the human condition that Kounellis represents with a series of knives so sharp to shred black coats. And then again works and experiments by Fabro, Icaro, Maiolino, the couple Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi. The volume is also accompanied by an essential chronology of art in Italy from 1989 to 2020 and a rich iconographic apparatus.