Chiara Casolo Ginelli

Materials and patterns from nature are among the qualities that Italian collector Chiara Casolo Ginelli is drawn to in art.

'When you create order, new things happen', she emphasises, speaking to her interest in drawing artworks together from different temporalities and contexts to create a kind of mosaic.

With a love of the Arte Povera movement, Ginelli has focused her collection on works by seminal Italian artists including Alighiero Boetti and a new generation of artists as Arcangelo Sassolino, and Zhanna Kadyrova. Her husband, Christian, is also a keen collector, though is more drawn to Art Informel and abstraction, with works by artists including Georges Mathieu and Luigi Pericle Giovanetti, as well as neon artists such as Christian Jankowski.

Pursuing a 'live' quality in art, Ginelli highlights the challenges that come with collecting artworks that have unique material properties. Among these is Ettore Spalletti's piece Colore, Azzurro, Argento (2015)—an artwork made of fine blue pigment that diffuses in reaction to the light within the space it is shown.

Spalletti had an exhibition in 2019 at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, which Ginelli recalls for its immersive, transcendental qualities. The quality of exhibitions in Monaco is one of the key draws for her in returning this year to attend artmonte-carlo, running between 14 and 16 July 2022.

The fair itself is notable for its high-quality presentations, Ginelli remarks, with a focus on work by modern, contemporary, and historical artists.

She is looking forward to encountering works by artists including Giorgio Griffa—one of the first artists whose work Ginelli collected, and who she just recently had the opportunity to visit in his Turin studio, and making new discoveries, as with Barthélémy Toguo, whose watercolour on paper painting she has included in her selection below of highlights at the fair.