Arezzo as a Canvas: Lis10 Gallery’s Vision of Universal Art

On 20 September 2025, Lis10 Gallery will unveil its new headquarters in the heart of Arezzo, affirming the city as the pulsating center of a network that already extends to Paris and Hong Kong. Founded in 2022 by Nicola Furini and Alberto Chiavacci, Lis10 has, from its inception, declared an international vocation, shaping a project that speaks through contemporary African art and resonates across continents.

The new gallery space, located at Piazza del Popolo 10, occupies former industrial premises that once belonged to the Teatro Petrarca. Its dramatic five-meter concrete walls, partially restored but left intentionally raw in places, create a dialogue between history and modernity. The architectural intervention, led by designer Michele Seppia, emphasizes this duality: a suspended tension between the unfinished and the refined, a stage where the material presence of the building mirrors the layered narratives of the art within.

Arezzo thus becomes not a provincial outpost but the nerve center of a gallery system that, in just three years, has gained recognition on both European and Asian fronts. The Parisian venue, a modest fifteen square meters in Rue De Crussol, was conceived as a pocket of intensity—small in scale, yet symbolically powerful in situating Lis10 within the historical arteries of the Marais. The Hong Kong opening in March 2025 confirmed a further expansion, positioning the gallery within the highly competitive Asian market, where the debate around global contemporary art increasingly unfolds.

In this trajectory, the decision to reinvest in Arezzo is neither nostalgic nor strategic alone: it is a statement of intent. As Gabriele Chianesi, director of Lis10, remarks, the idea of maintaining a presence in the city has never been abandoned. Rather, the ambition has been to create a headquarters capable of embodying the gallery’s ethos: to bring the African contemporary discourse into resonance with broader questions of universality, identity, and access to the sensible.

The inaugural exhibitions, which will open the new season, are expected to crystallize this programmatic vision. More than celebratory gestures, they will act as manifestos, underscoring the gallery’s commitment to an art that transcends geographical boundaries while remaining rooted in the specificities of context. The large vitrines opening onto the square amplify this ambition: the art is no longer secluded within white cubes, but visibly inserted into the urban fabric, offering passers-by an immediate encounter, a chance to pause and reflect.

Yet what is most compelling about Lis10’s return to Arezzo is the symbolic inversion it performs. At a time when many galleries abandon smaller cities to chase visibility in global capitals, Lis10 chooses to recalibrate its center of gravity in a place that is simultaneously marginal and historic, provincial and universal. This gesture resists the binary between center and periphery, suggesting instead that cultural relevance can emerge wherever the conditions for dialogue are created.

From this perspective, Arezzo is not a retreat from the global stage but an experiment in reimagining the geography of art. By situating the discourse on contemporary African practices within the medieval grid of Tuscany, Lis10 proposes a radical juxtaposition: a confrontation of temporalities, textures, and imaginaries. It is precisely in this tension that the gallery’s universalist vision takes shape.

For Charlotte, this move resonates as more than a logistical choice. It reflects a curatorial philosophy that seeks to dissolve hierarchies between metropolises and provinces, between dominant narratives and overlooked voices. In this sense, the new headquarters becomes less a container for exhibitions than a threshold—an opening where art articulates its most urgent task: to remind us that universality is never given, but always constructed, negotiated, and shared.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved