Palazzo Merulana, home of the Elena and Claudio Cerasi Foundation, managed and enhanced by CoopCulture, is pleased to present In Your Hands, a solo exhibition by the sculptor Matteo Pugliese, curated by Carmen Sabbatini.

The exhibition is realized with the patronage of Rome Capital and with the contribution of Zurich Bank, the official sponsor.

For the occasion, the artwork that gives the title to the project, In Your Hands, will be presented for the first time in Italy, during the current jubilee year.

The sculptor, already present in the permanent collection with Gravitas, is the protagonist of a rich and articulated exhibition project of about 50 works that, through 4 sections, analyze a theme very dear to the artist's creative research: the decisive relationship between sacredness and immanence.

Matteo Pugliese's works are indeed placed in a dimension that transcends the mere material fact to dialogue with the universal structures of the sacred.
 

The sections will be distributed on the various exhibition floors of the museum, triggering a fruitful exchange and dialogue with the permanent collection.
 

The artist, with his iconic figures emerging from the material, with the hieratic representations of protective spirits guarding the sacred space, and with the solar beetles guarding the memory, performs a gesture that recalls the eternal conflict between immanence and transcendence, between body and spirit, between oblivion and eternity. Pugliese, in particular, reinterprets one of the greatest masterpieces of universal art, Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper, which evokes one of the most sacred moments of Christianity, "The Last Supper" of Christ with his disciples in the installation that gives the title to the exhibition, In Your Hands.

Italy and Rome, in the year of the Jubilee and around Easter, thus become the perfect context to exhibit the artwork.

The exhibition is therefore configured as a path not only historical-artistic, rich in content and expressive research of the sculptor Matteo Pugliese, but also as a stage of an ideal pilgrimage on the themes of the sacred that the public can undertake, through the spiritual portal that the arts can unfold and on which to graft a universal reflection.