“I was born to put together this collection”.

For sixty years, Gian Enzo Sperone has been one of the world’s most important gallery owners and one of the most influential personalities in international contemporary art. A dealer and talent scout, he started out in Turin in the 1960s, bringing the great new American art to Italy, before heading to New York in the 1970s. Since then he has bought, sold, traded and acquired thousands of works.

The Mart presents, all together for the first time, 400 works from Gian Enzo Sperone’s private collection, some of which have never been shown in Italian museums. In Rovereto, this unique collection brings together the great 20th-century masters, such as Giacomo Balla, Pablo Picasso, Lucio Fontana and Andy Warhol, alongside masterpieces of ancient art, from Roman archaeology to 14th-century paintings with gold backgrounds, as well as works by Iacopino del Conte, Sofonisba Anguissola, Bernardo Strozzi, Anton Raphael Mengs and Francesco Hayez.

Consistent with Gian Enzo Sperone’s collection, which chronicles an unbounded passion for art in all its forms, the exhibition is omnivorous, an exercise in taste where apparent contradictions can only surrender.