LORENZO BALBI

Lorenzo Balbi (Turin, 1982. Lives and works in Bologna) has been the artistic director of MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna since 2017, when he took on the role of Head of the Modern and Contemporary Art Area of the Istituzione Bologna Musei, to which, in addition to MAMbo, Villa delle Rose, Museo Morandi, Casa Morandi, Museo per la Memoria di Ustica and Residenza per artisti Sandra Natali belong.

After his studies in Conservation of Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, he specialized in Contemporary Art at the University of Turin. His texts and articles have been published in various journals including: Il Giornale dell’Arte, Inside Art, Artribune, Mousse, La Stampa, Exibart, ATP Diary, Il Giornale dell’Architettura, Juliet. For four years he was artistic director of the Verso Artecontemporanea gallery in Turin, a space dedicated to research on emerging artists from the Asian continent. From 2006 to 2017 at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, he taught Methodology of Curating in Campo, a course for curators, and was responsible for the organization and development of exhibition projects in the spaces of the institution in Turin and Guarene d’Alba, as well as the exhibitions of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection abroad. He followed as assistant curator the project Residenza per Giovani Curatori Stranieri in 2009 (coordinator Ilaria Bonacossa), in 2011 and 2012 (coordinator Stefano Collicelli Cagol), until becoming the curator responsible for three editions from 2015 to 2017. Since 2018 he has taken over the artistic direction of ART CITY Bologna, a series of exhibition events in the city promoted on the occasion of Arte Fiera. Professor of Art Systems at the DAMS of the University of Bologna, he is a member of the board of directors of AMACI – Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums and of the coordination of the Forum of Italian Contemporary Art.

Among the exhibitions curated: Riikka Kuoppala. La casa di biscotti (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, 2013); Thomas Teurlai. Europium (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, 2014); Stanze/Rooms (meCollectors Room, Berlino, 2014); Pierre Michelon. Parole e angurie (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, 2015); Spin-Off (Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Quito, 2015); Daniel Frota. Irrealis Mood (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, 2016); Ghita Skali. Palm Attacks: a few invasive species (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, 2017); It’s OK to change your mind. Arte contemporanea russa dalla Collezione Gazprombank (Villa delle Rose, Bologna, 2018, con Suad Garayeva-Maleki); Katarina Zdjelar. Ungrammatical (Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau, Bologna, 2018); Rosanna Chiessi. Pari&Dispari (MAMbo – Project Room, Bologna, 2018); That’s IT! Sull’ultima generazione di artisti in Italia e a un metro e ottanta dal confine (MAMbo, Bologna, 2018); Vadim Zakharov. Tunguska Event, History Marches on a Table (Ex-GAM, Bologna, 2018); Mika Rottenberg (MAMbo, Bologna, 2019); Goran Trbuljak. Before and After Retrospective (Villa delle Rose, Bologna, 2019, con Andrea Bellini); Julian Charrière. All we ever wanted was everything and everywhere (MAMbo, Bologna, 2019); Cesare Pietroiusti. Un certo numero di cose (MAMbo, Bologna, 2019); AGAINandAGAINandAGAINand. Ed Atkins, Luca Francesconi, Apostolos Georgiou, Ragnar Kjartansson, Susan Philipsz, Cally Spooner, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (MAMbo, Bologna, 2020), Romeo Castellucci. La Vita Nuova (DumBo, Bologna, 2020).