Rome’s MAXXI Will Close for Six Weeks to Reboot

Under the guidance of artistic director Hou Hanru, Rome’s MAXXI National Museum of 21st-Century Arts will undergo a complete reboot between now and October, reports the Art Newspaper.

The Zaha Hadid-designed museum opened in 2010, but by 2012 the institution was facing severe financial troubles and was almost shut down by the government (see report from Art in America). Now Hou, who was hired in July, has announced plans to close the museum for six weeks, completely stripping down and reinstalling the museum for a fresh start.

As part of the museum’s new direction, Hou has arranged a series of exhibitions that will allow MAXXI to partner with other museums internationally.

Contemporary art from the Middle East will be showcased in “United History: Sequences of the Modern in Iran from 1960 until the Present,” co-organized with the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Catherine David, deputy director of Paris’s Centre Pompidou. The show will appear in Paris next month before traveling to MAXXI in December. 

The museum will also be working in concert with London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, whose exhibition “The Glamour of Italian Fashion: 1945–2014” (April 5–July 27) pairs nicely with “Bellissima,” opening at MAXXI in December.

Finally, a solo show of China’s Huang Yong Ping will travel from MAXXI to Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum in 2015 and Shanghai’s Power Station of Art in 2016.