The Sacred Art School in Florence offers its students the opportunity to study painting, sculpting, and goldsmithing. Exhibition curator, Giorgio Fozzati says the school also challenges its students to use their artwork to go beyond the status quo and live extraordinary lives.
GIORGIO FOZZATI
Curator of the exhibit, “Grazia e Innocenza”
We have also started a line of production of our own works of art representing young people, blessed, saints in the 21st century: Carlo Acutis, Chiara Luce Badano, and many others.
Young people today, if you set the bar high, they will jump. They need to set the bar high so that they jump both effectively and truly. And these examples are real examples; they are beautiful examples and they are also accessible examples. Not far off in time; not far off in culture, history, and tradition.
Visiting artist Paola Grossi Gondi believes that
combining the sacred with ordinary life takes a lot of personal reflection.
PAOLA GROSSI GONDI
Visiting Artist
I, as an artist, am looking for beauty in the everyday, so often my subjects are puddles or details of the ground around us or walls lit by a moment of magic.
But certainly when the theme, for various reasons, points to the sacred, to religious subjects, the focus changes a bit. In other words, I realize that it is not the same thing to depict a female figure, a person who is drawn or the Madonna, Holy Mother Mary. And my experience is that I have to deal with the art in a different way, in a totally personal way, looking at the relationship between sacred persons, sacred mysteries and my heart.
Fozzati encourages students to be inspired by real life to express the divine. This is the theme of the current exhibit in Rome.
GIORGIO FOZZATI
Curator of the exhibit, “Grazia e Innocenza”
The exhibition, entitled 'Grace and Innocence', is dedicated to motherhood - divine motherhood and human motherhood. Of course, at this time, motherhood for us, for everyone means hope. When a child is born, it is a hope for everyone, a hope for humanity. In this moment of war, we have a lot of hope, to feed this hope of ours.
For students studying at the Sacred Art School, learning how to portray both the sacred and the ordinary in their artwork can be a small way of giving hope to those in difficult situations.
KG
