From March 19 to May 23, the Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa present Antonio Canova, an installation by the internationally renowned German artist-photographer Matthias Schaller, accompanied by a refined artist's book.

The project, conceived by Matthias Schaller and curated by Xavier F. Salomon, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator of the Frick Collection in New York, in collaboration with the Sonnabend Gallery in New York and which sees a contextual edition at the Museum Kunstpalast of Düsseldorf, is part of the program of Canova celebrations that the Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa dedicate to the great sculptor and which will alternate more classic exhibition initiatives with events that, like this one, focus on the link between Antonio Canova and contemporary creativity.

The large installation, visible in the newly restored octagon, heart and junction point between the three large halls that house the permanent collections of the Civic Museum, consists of a series of 16 high-definition photographic enlargements. The images, which at first glance may seem almost abstract, portray, at an extremely close distance, some portions of Canova's plaster self-portrait with repère, preserved at the Antonio Canova Gypsotheca Museum in Possagno and photographed by Schaller in 2018.

Assembled in a composition of four by four photos, the photos are today presented to the public for the first time, alongside the recently restored Canovian self-portrait of the Bassano Museum. The protagonist of the work is the scratched and scratched surface of the plaster, that is the material of which the self-portrait with all its imperfections is composed. Sixteen enlargements of small portions of the face that do not allow to recognize the features of the face of the great sculptor but rather break up and recompose Canova's physiognomy in a continuous passage of soft chiaroscuro ranging from white to gray to black of the bronze dots which, having assumed the form of large circles, they strongly attract our attention.