PastPresentFuture

Highlights from the UniCredit Collection

Highlights from the UniCredit and Yapı Kredi Art Collections 

The Yapı Kredi Culture Centre hosted the travelling exhibition entitled PastPresentFuture that débuted in Vienna in October 2009 and later moved to Verona in February 2010. A selection from the UniCredit and Yapı Kredi, two of the largest in institutional collections in Europe was on view in Istanbul, the 2010 Culture Capital of Europe, between 6 November 2010 and 7 January 2011. The UniCredit selection was handpicked from several banks within the group. Eight Yapı Kredi collection pieces join the highlights: an Osman Hamdi Bey ‘Veiled Women’ and seven other artists from different generations.

Curated by Walter Guadagnini, Chairman of the UniCredit Artistic Commission, the exhibition covers some four hundred years of European art history. This priceless art collection débuted in Turkey with a 90-piece exhibition aiming to forge bridges between periods and languages.

The artistic and cultural heritage of the group is largely derived from the Italian UniCredit, German HypoVereinsbank and the Viennese Bank Austria collections. This valuable collection comprises approximately 60,000 pieces illustrating the entire history of art from ancient Greece and Rome. Currently under study and cataloguing, the collection displayed in UniCredit Group headquarters and UniCredit’s institutional partners on the cultural arena is in many ways a supra-European museum.

The multilingual exhibition concept enables the visitors to stand at today’s viewpoint as they review the past and consider the future. It showcases major works of art such as old paintings by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo and Dosso Dossi, Kurt Schwitters’ collages, Giorgio de Chirico’s canvases, installations by artists such as Tony Cragg, Stephen Balkenhol and Giulio Paolini, and photographs by Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth.

PastPresentFuture establishes a dialogue between cultures as well as the arts and the works of art ancient and contemporary, placing as it does paintings, photographs, installations and statues side by side. This same exchange of ideas proffers a fascinating, yet surprising experience appealing to both the senses and the intellect.