Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Harry Bertoia

Pordenone's gallery of modern and contemporary art bears the name of Harry Bertoia, the designer and sculptor born at San Lorenzo d'Arzene, known for the Diamond Chair and his sounding steel sculptures. It occupies Palazzo Spelladi, a fourteenth-century house.

Why it matters

Bertoia is one of the few Italians of the twentieth century to reshape how the whole world sits down and listens: his steel-rod Diamond Chair of 1951-52 remains in production, and his sounding sculptures turn wind and touch into music. He was born in 1915 a few kilometres from Pordenone, emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, and studied and taught at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The city's gallery of modern and contemporary art carries his name as a declaration — that this provincial capital on the Noncello speaks the international language of twentieth-century design — and its programme has made photography one of its signatures, with exhibitions devoted to Steve McCurry, Elliott Erwitt, Bruno Barbey, Inge Morath and Robert Doisneau.

What to notice

Palazzo Spelladi itself is part of the gallery's story. The oldest part of Palazzo Spelladi dates to the early fourteenth century, when Pordenone's merchant houses were crowding around the Duomo and the river port. The curial Rorario family lived here — diplomats and writers — before the Spelladi, counted among the city's twelve oldest houses, held it until 1777. Sixteenth-century Venetian-school frescoes with hunting scenes, putti and the double arms of the Maniago and Michiel families survive. The twentieth century left marks too: left as a single floor after the First World War, the palace gained its upper storey in a 1939 renovation, passed to the Municipality in the 1980s, and was converted into exhibition space in a restoration campaign that ran to 2014.

Context and history

The gallery belongs to the final act of a long domestic story. After the Spelladi came other owners recorded on the city's registers; by the interwar years the palace had lost its grandeur, and its resurrection as a public gallery required the city to buy it — the purchase came at the start of the 1980s — and to restore it across a campaign dated 2008-2014. Reopened under Bertoia's name, it joined Pordenone Musei, the network that also operates Palazzo Ricchieri opposite, and its programme has featured curated temporary shows, including thematic and photographic exhibitions.