A few days before the opening of the new contemporary art museum dedicated to the Sonnabend Collection and hosted in Mantua’s Palazzo della Ragione, we asked artistic director Mario Codognato to walk us through the stages of this ambitious project.

Everything is ready for 29 November 2025, when the Sonnabend Collection Mantova will open its doors to the public, inviting them to admire the works of one of the world’s most famous contemporary art collections in the setting of Mantua’s Palazzo della Ragione. Artistic director Mario Codognato told us how a new museum is born.

What are the main operative stages that have characterised the development of the project – from its conception to its imminent launch?
A tortuous path with a linear result. A chain of serendipitous events and of breaking down barriers. Toto Bergamo Rossi, a dear friend from Venice and head of Venetian Heritage, is a frequent visitor to Mantua and knew Mayor Mattia Palazzi well. The latter told him about the Palazzo della Regione in the city centre and the search for a high-level cultural use for the building. Toto told me about it, and I told him that the Sonnabend Collection, with whom I have always had a close relationship, was looking for a permanent home for their masterpieces. We all got together and four years later we are ready to inaugurate a new extraordinary museum of modern art. In my account, I have omitted the names of many other extraordinary people who assisted and helped us in Mantua.

Which professionals were involved in the construction of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova and how did you structure the dialogue with the city and its institutions?
The extraordinary exhibition design was conceived by Mantua architect Federico Fedel who, together with the president of the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, Antonio Homem, divided the space, the single volume of the Palazzo della Ragione, into eleven magnificent exhibition rooms. Lawyer Ezio Zani guided us through the entire legal process.

What is the logic and reasoning behind the exhibition layout?
As we said, there are eleven rooms, where the history of American and European art in the second half of the last century is reconstructed in chronological order and according to thematic and historical-geographical similarities.

How does the Sonnabend Collection Mantova interact with the spaces of the Palazzo della Ragione?
The sequence of rooms is designed in such a way as to maintain the perception of the medieval building and to allow visitors to see the extraordinary frescoes that decorate it.

What types of audience did you have in mind during the various stages of the project? And what tools and strategies will you adopt to ensure visitor engagement?
The division into rooms designed to contain the various phases of the collection, as well as the historiographical path they represent, allows for in-depth study even by the general public who are not specialists. Each room will be equipped with a summary explanation of the works and the artistic movements to which they belong.

What museum and exhibition models, if any, have inspired you?
It is a case that is too unique, the combination of a medieval building of this size and the particular nature of the collection. So no model, but a dedicated design.

Interview by Arianna Testino

https://www.sonnabendmantova.it

BIO
Mario Codognato has served as the Chief Curator of MADRE since it opened in Naples in 2005. In this capacity, he has curated retrospectives of Jannis Kounellis (2006), Rachel Whiteread (2007), Thomas Struth (2008) and Franz West (2010) among others. He has previously worked at the contemporary art project at the Archeological Museum in Naples, where he has curated the exhibitions of Francesco Clemente (2002), Jeff Koons (2003), Anish Kapoor (2003), Richard Serra (2004), Anselm Kiefer (2004) and the first museum retrospective of Damien Hirst (2004). Since 1999 he has curated the site-specific public projects for Piazza Plebiscito in Naples, including Robert Rauschenberg (1999), Joseph Kosuth (2001), Sol Lewitt (2005), Jenny Holzer (2006), Jan Fabre (2008) and Carsten Nicolai (2009). He has curated exhibitions for other institutions and written their catalogue essays on the work of Alighiero Boetti (1992 and 1999), Richard Long (1994 and 1997), Gilbert & George (1998), Jan Fabre (1999), Brice Marden (2001), Wolfgang Laib (2005), Candida Hoeffer (2013), Douglas Gordon (2017) and Ed Ruscha (2019). He has curated several thematic exhibitions, Barock at MADRE in 2009 and Fragile? at the Cini Foundation in Venice in 2013. From 2014 to 2016 he was Chief Curator at the 21er Haus of the Belvedere in Vienna, where his shows include retrospective exhibitions of Olafur Eliasson, Tomás Saraceno and Sterling Ruby, and the exhibition Sleepless on the history and role of the bed in art. Latest projects include Anish Kapoor at Macro in Rome (2017) and Houghton Hall in Norfolk (2019), Damien Hirst at Houghton Hall in Norfolk (2018), Galleria Borghese in Rome (2021), and Georg Baselitz at the Museum Palazzo Grimani in Venice (2021). Since 2016, Codognato has been the Director of the Anish Kapoor Foundation and since 2022 the Director of Berggruen Arts & Culture.