Image: Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
Prato’s Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci will open 'Lorenza Longhi. VILLA DELIZIA' on 19 September 2026, presenting the first solo exhibition devoted to Lorenza Longhi in an Italian institution. The show will run through 10 January 2027 in the museum’s Ala Nio, with an opening on 18 September at 18:00.
Curated by Michele Bertolino, the exhibition brings together new works made for the occasion and a site-specific intervention that reshapes the museum’s rooms. According to the center, Longhi’s project turns attention to the ways objects, materials and images help construct everyday desire and perception, focusing on the circulation of consumer goods in contemporary European and American society.
Longhi’s practice uses furnishings, textiles, passementerie and other material from the visual and domestic world to examine how objects are shown and consumed. The museum describes her work as one that engages ornament, kitsch and glam while staging collective codes of taste. It also notes her use of do-it-yourself methods, including found materials, stencil work and screenprinting without a matrix, along with fragments of recovered material applied directly to the printing surface.
In 'VILLA DELIZIA', Longhi transforms the exhibition space itself. The installation will intervene in circular ceiling windows, dress the Centro Pecci’s historic sofas and reference display solutions created by Formafantasma for the institution’s permanent collection. Passementerie, seating, cushions, a portal and window films are set to create an enveloping environment that brings exhibition design to the foreground and shows how display strategies can condition the public’s gaze.
Several large canvases, all produced for the show, use textiles selected from manufacturers and companies in the Prato area, including Cangioli 1859 and Tessilfibre, with screenprinting and flocking developed in collaboration with Floccatura Balmar. The museum says Longhi removes these materials from their original function in order to compose formally refined works that make visible the economic, symbolic and cultural dynamics running through contemporary production.
The exhibition is accompanied by a volume published by Mousse Publishing. Titled 'Opera d’arte nella Villa Delizia', the book includes original contributions by fashion historian and curator Marta Franceschini, curators Alice Motard and Giorgio Motisi, and Michele Bertolino. Centro Pecci presents the publication as a catalogue of the works on view, extending the exhibition’s focus on desire, display and material culture.
