Uffizi Galleries and Bund One Art Museum celebrate the first milestone of their five-year partnership with the opening of ‘Uffizi – Self-Portrait Masterpieces‘, the art exhibition inaugurated today by the Consul General of Italy in Shanghai Tiziana D’Angelo at Shanghai’s Bund One Art Museum.
Supported by the Consulate General of Italy and by the Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai, the exhibition is part of the rich program of the 2022 Italy-China Year of Culture and Tourism. It displays self-portraits from some of the greatest painters of the last five centuries including Titian, Raphael, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Morandi, Guttuso, Yayoi Kusama and Cai Guoqiang. They are all extraordinary works from the one-of-a-kind Self-Portrait Collection of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.
From September 9 2022 up until January 8 2023, visitors will be able to admire and engage with the visual language and style of great painters from all over the world who, by portraying themselves with their art, wanted to fix an imperishable image of themselves, holding up a mirror to their soul but also to their time.
In her speech, the Consul General declared: “It is a matter of great pride for me to be able to celebrate this extraordinary collaboration between the Uffizi Galleries and the Bund One Art Museum in Shanghai during the Italy-China Year of Culture and Tourism. The Italian and Chinese people are both heirs to millennia of history and share a great passion for art and beauty. Thanks to ‘Self-portrait Masterpieces’ and the exhibitions that will follow it, Shanghai will become one of the pivots of a great effort to strengthen the understanding and appreciation of Italy’s rich cultural heritage on the global stage “
The Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai Francesco D’Arelli noted how “’Self-Portrait Masterpieces’ is a roundup of the faces of artists who have written some of the most memorable pages in the history of art, from the Renaissance to the contemporary era. Florence and Shanghai, the Uffizi Galleries and Bund One Art Museum continue to look at each other with the curiosity for their respective cultures that has always characterized the dialogue between Italy and China, cradles of the some of the most ancient civilizations. May this be only the first step towards a long and shared journey into the future, filled with beauty and rich in dialogue.”
In his video address at the opening, the Director of the Uffizi Galleries Eike Schmidt highlighted the high profile of this loan: “With more than 1,800 works, the collection of self-portraits of the Uffizi Galleries is unparalleled. […] At a time like the one we are living through, engaging with the faces of the artists is an opportunity for visitors to stop and consider the quality and intrinsic strength of these images, thus entering into a direct dialogue with masters past and present.”
Announced on November 6 2021 in Shanghai, the agreement between Uffizi Galleries and Bund One Art Museum aims at bringing to China ten exhibitions throughout five years (2022-2027), all from the collections of the great Florentine museum.
This agreement between the two museums is the result of a systematic effort of collaboration that involved the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation – through the Embassy of Italy in Beijing and the Consulate General and the Italian Institute of Culture in Shanghai – the Ministry of Culture, and the Municipality of Florence.
