MARION BARUCH – UN PASSO AVANTI TANTI DIETRO (ONE STEP FORWARD, MANY BACK)
The Museo Novecento in Florence presents “Un passo avanti tanti dietro” (One Step Forward, Many Back), the largest retrospective in Italy dedicated to Marion Baruch, a cosmopolitan artist and tireless experimenter. The exhibition, curated by Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli, will be open from March 15 to June 8, 2025, and extends to the spaces of the Manifattura Tabacchi and Polimoda, organizations that have actively collaborated in the realization of the project. The exhibition offers an in-depth overview of the artist’s research and journey, highlighting the consistency and versatility of her work.
A fervent advocate for an authorship free from constraints, throughout her long career, Baruch has effortlessly explored different media, materials, and disciplines, from the visual arts to fashion and design. She has developed a completely personal approach to formalism, creating an expressive language that materializes in sculptures, paintings, installations, objects, and evocative images that are never predictable. Her works reflect the influence of movements and currents that have marked the history of contemporary art in recent decades – from Conceptual Art to Minimalism, from Institutional Critique to Relational Art – yet they defend an undeniable autonomy.
Over more than sixty years, Baruch has never ceased to question the meaning of artistic creation and its place in society, developing an aesthetic that is both formally defined and at once dry and concrete, as well as full of reflections tied to reality and the political and social dimensions of art.
The exhibition at Museo Novecento allows visitors to retrace her intense activity in a nonlinear way, marked by continuous changes in direction and new adventures. The arrangement of the works does not follow a strictly chronological order but highlights the presence of some constant reflections, such as those surrounding language, work, migration, feminism, patriarchy, consumer society, and the internet. The exhibition allows one to explore the early works of the mid-1960s, the performative sculptures and works created with designers such as AG Fronzoni and Dino Gavina, the collaboration with the Galleria Luciano Inga Pin in Milan, the birth of NAME DIFFUSION in the 1990s, the Parisian period with relational and participatory works created collectively, and finally, the fabric works produced after 2000, with her return to Italy in Gallarate, for which she is widely recognized internationally.
The title of the exhibition, “Un passo avanti tanti dietro” (One Step Forward, Many Back), is inspired by a recent fabric work and pays tribute to the dynamic, receptive, and persevering attitude of this artist, always connected to the present but projected toward the future.
Marion Baruch was born in Timișoara in 1929 to a Hungarian family. After an initial period of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, she moved to Israel, where she attended the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Here, she studied under the painter and Bauhaus artist Mordecai Ardon, refining her expressive language. In 1953, she held her first exhibition at the Micra Studio in Tel Aviv, earning a scholarship that allowed her to move to Italy. From 1955 onwards, she continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where she began to develop an open vision of art, fostering dialogue between different disciplines.
Starting in the 1960s, her practice developed at the intersection of art and design. She collaborated with prominent figures such as AG Fronzoni and Dino Gavina, contributing to the creation of radical design objects such as Ron Ron and Lorenz, part of the Ultramobile series. In the 1990s, she founded NAME DIFFUSION, an artistic collective through which she created installations and participatory projects exploring themes related to identity, communication, and the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Since 1993, Baruch has split her time between Italy and Paris, where she settled permanently from 1998 to 2010, collaborating with numerous groups and collectives to create works that address social and political issues such as feminism, migration, and the impact of new technologies. Some of her most significant projects from this period include “L’autre Nom” (1994), “Code your soul” (1996), and “Tapis volant” (from 2005 to the present). Since 2011, the artist has returned to live and work in Gallarate, continuing her research on the relationship between art and society through the use of reclaimed textile materials. These fabric sculptures establish a dialogue between space and memory, reflecting on the concepts of body, production, and consumption.
The works of Marion Baruch are exhibited in prestigious international institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Luzern, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, the Mamco in Geneva, the Triennale in Milan, and the Museion in Bolzano. The exhibition at Museo Novecento does not follow a chronological order but highlights the constants of her artistic research, offering a journey through her early works of the 1960s, her collaborations with the world of design, the collective projects of the 1990s, and her more recent fabric installations.
In this retrospective, special attention is given to the dialogue between historical works and more recent textile installations, in which the artist continues to investigate the relationship between art and industry, transforming waste materials into poetic forms laden with memory. Her ability to reinvent artistic language and her ongoing engagement with the dynamics of the present make Marion Baruch one of the most significant voices on the contemporary scene.
The exhibition title, “Un passo avanti tanti dietro” (One Step Forward, Many Back), is taken from a recent textile work and encapsulates Marion Baruch’s attitude of moving between past and future, questioning the transformations of contemporary society and culture. The exhibition project aims to convey the complexity and depth of her work, offering visitors a unique opportunity to discover one of the most original voices in contemporary art.
Museo Novecento, Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, 10 in Florence (info: www.museonovecento.it).
Hours: Mon – Tue – Wed – Fri – Sat – Sun | 11:00 – 20:00. Manifattura Tabacchi hours: Wed – Fri | 15:00 – 20:00 and Sat and Sun | 12:00 – 20:00 – Closed April 20, 21, 25
