On October 4, 2008, over 1,200 art enthusiasts visited the Milan headquarters of Deutsche Bank. The impressive building on the Piazza del Calendario in the Bicocca quarter houses the DB Collection Italy, which encompasses around 300 works by contemporary artists. The open house took place as part of the initiative “Invito a Palazzo” organized by the Associazione Bancaria Italiana, in which banks all across Italy open their doors to present their art collections to the public. In the large entrance foyer, visitors encountered Patrick Tuttofuoco’s suspended light sculpture X-Flag, one of five installations made as works commissioned especially for the building, which was designed by architect Gino Valle. While kids took part in special workshops and tours, adults were introduced to the most important works of the collection on guided tours throughout the building.

Italy is the theme of most of the works on show in Milan, as can be seen in Massimo Vitali’s large-scale beach panorama or Ina Weber’s delicate watercolors of kiosks of the kind that can be found everywhere from Lombardy to Sicily. This is also the case with many of the new acquisitions presented on this day, such as Gabriele Basilico’s black and white images of dancers in Italian discos, which the classic of Italian photography took in the 1970s. The main focus of the DB Collection Italy, however, is on young artists, such as the Milan-based Albanian Adrian Paci, whose work investigates the theme of migration, or Alice Cannava, whose installation Phantom Records consists of covers designed for fictional records.

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