The art world is in mourning, Giuliano Gori, collector and patron, has died: “His passion was everyone’s heritage”

The Celle Farm will seem empty without it Giuliano Gori. And the installation “For those who fly” by Luigi Mainolfi – a bench on the roof facing the sunset, which Gori had wanted to honor the memory of his wife Pina – will now be for him too. The great art collector and patron of Prato passed away last night in hospital, at the age of 94 years old. For a few months he had not been well, then in the last week the sudden worsening.

The world of art thus loses one of its most important and passionate protagonists, a brilliant and generous mind, which from 1970 to today has never stopped building relationships with artists from all over the world and promoting their presence in Tuscany. An absolute precursor who had understood the importance of contemporary artistic language and fell in love with it, involving his wife and four children, Patrizia, Fabio, Paolo and Stefania, in this mission.

Born in Prato in 1930, a textile entrepreneur, Gori began buying art already after the war. In 1970, he left his house in Prato, which had become too small for his ever-expanding collection, and moved with his entire family to the Celle Farm, in Santomato, in the Pistoia area. It is in the wonderful 45-hectare park that surrounds the villa and the various annexes that Gori will give life to something unique, creating the largest collection of contemporary environmental art in the world with dozens and dozens of works and installations by artists such as Alberto Burri, ChristoJean Michel Folon, Keith Haring, Anselm KieferJoseph Kosuth, Dani Caravan. And the Italians Marino Marini, Eliseo Mattiacci, Emilio Vedova, Mimmo Paladino.

The first installations they were inaugurated in 1982. Two years ago, on the occasion of Celle’s fortieth anniversary, Gori said: “It took me a lot of courage to carry forward an idea like this.” His was a new form of patronage, or more simply the realization of a dream: hosting the biggest names on the international contemporary art scene, inviting them to breathe the air of its hills and create something unique, respecting the centuries-old trees, of the undergrowth, of the meadows. Yes, because Gori loved nature in the same way. In 2015, when the wind uprooted more than 500 plants, Gori “healed” this wound with a new work of art by four hands: the “Poets’ Greenhouse”, designed by the writer Sandro Veronesi and surrounded by 30 cypresses commissioned by the landscape designer Andrea MN Mati, each dedicated to a poet.

Not just Celle. The name of Giuliano Gori recurs in the geography of international contemporary art and above all in the Florence-Prato-Pistoia axis. It was him, in 1973, together with Loriano Bertini, to bring Henry Moore’s “Square shape with cut” to Prato, and then in 1988, to be among the founding members of the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art. And Gori, a great friend of the Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan, acted as an intermediary to install the monumental work “Tempo” on the territory of the Municipality of Calenzano: an enormous wheel positioned right at the exit of the motorway toll booth.

«There are men who, with their passion, their generosity, their intelligence, manage to create experiences of beauty and creativity that become everyone’s heritage. Giuliano Gori, the brilliant creator of the extraordinary art collection housed in the Fattoria di Celle in Pistoia, was one of these. Thanks to him, Tuscany was able to host one of the most important land art experiences in Europe” said the president of the Tuscany Region, Eugenio Giani, remembering the entrepreneur and collector from Prato. And the councilor Stefano Ciuoffo added: «Giuliano Gori has been able to combine the qualities of a great businessman with those of an art enthusiast, accompanying the sensitivity for new contemporary languages ​​with the valorization of environmental contexts called to marry with the artists’ creations» .