With Hagoromo, the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato is dedicating an important exhibition to Massimo Bartolini (Cecina, 1962) from 16 September 2022 to 8 January 2023 . The exhibition is a new chapter in the cycle of monographs that the Center organizes annually to present the work of Italian artists to the public.

The exhibition, curated by Luca Cerizza with Elena Magini and created in partnership with Intesa Sanpaolo, presents a new installation – the largest ever created by the artist – expressly conceived for the museum spaces, a sort of new backbone that guides the spectator to discover works belonging to different moments of his career. Eluding the retrospective character, the chronological and thematic organization, the exhibition functions as an itinerary made up of surprising and revealing encounters.

Hagoromo is the title of a well-known play from Japanese Noh theatre, which tells the story of a fisherman who one day finds the hagoromo, the feathered mantle of the tennin, a celestial female spirit of supernatural beauty part of Japanese mythology. To the spirit's request to get back the mantle without which she could not have returned to heaven, the fisherman replies that he would only give it to her after seeing her dance.

Hagoromo (1989) is also the title of what Bartolini considers his first mature work: inside his old studio, on an illuminated stage, a musician improvises music for the saxophone. A dancer reacts to the music, moving inside a parallelepiped on wheels, which looks like a tiny housing unit. 

In this performance some of the themes and characters that still accompany his research today are already anticipated: the narrative dimension, which develops starting from homages, references, samples of other stories, works and biographies; the relationship with the architectural and spatial dimension; the relationship with the theatrical and performative dimension, also through the use of sound and music; the delineation within the work of relationships between apparently irreconcilable opposites.