MART

A full visit to the collections takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

A visit to the temporary exhibitions takes about an hour.

Mart, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, is one of the most important European museums. Opened in 1987 as a functional organisation of the Provincia Autonoma di Trento, it has three different locations: the main museum, Rovereto’s Casa d'Arte Futurista Depero and the Galleria Civica in Trento.

Conceived as a "cultural centre", Mart collaborates with nearby public institutions: the Tartarotti Public Library, the Melotti Auditorium, the Zandonai Theatre and Palazzo Alberti Poja.

The large square at the entrance of the museum forms the heart of the architecture. It is crowned by a large steel and glass dome with the same dimensions of the Pantheon in Rome: 40 metres in diameter and 25 metres high. Opened in 2002 and designed by Mario Botta, Mart is a large architectural complex that spans three floors with over 5,000 square metres of exhibition space. The basement floor houses the 20th Century Archive and specialised library. The permanent collections and the large temporary exhibitions are arranged around the vertical axis of the museum.

The first floor exhibition, The Invention of the Modern, starts with nineteenth-century works before moving through the avant-garde and tradition of the first half of the 20th Century, with pieces by Italian artists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Massimo Campigli, Felice Casorati, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Fortunato Depero, Giorgio Morandi, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini and Mario Sironi.

The second floor is home to The Incursion of the Contemporary, an exhibition that examines how the conceptual, physical and geographical boundaries of art were torn down. Studies of matter and spatial boundaries by Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana are displayed alongside the conceptualism of Piero Manzoni. The exhibition then moves on to the American approach to Pop Art, the vivid abstract art of Afro Basaldella, Emilio Vedova and Gastone Novelli, and the eclectic studies of image by Luigi Ontani and the Transavantgarde. Next, pieces by Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Mario Merz, Giovanni Anselmo and Vincenzo Agnetti characterise the 1970s, before we arrive at the present day, with the work of new generations of Italian and international artists, demonstrating the varied languages of contemporary art.