Giuseppe Spagnulo

There are works that have been part of a city for so long that they become part of its inner landscape, almost without us realizing it. This is the case with Turris and Paesaggio, the two monumental sculptures that Giuseppe Spagnulo – one of the leading figures in Italian sculpture of the late 20th century – created in the early 1980s for the former Unipol headquarters in Via Stalingrado, Bologna, and which today form part of the Unipol Group’s Artistic Heritage. A truncated column that opens up like a well of light, through which one can walk as if on a journey back to one’s origins: an expansive landscape, a horizon of earth, matter and memory.
More than forty years after their creation, Turris and Paesaggio are now, for the first time, the focus of a conservation project – an initiative aimed at preserving and enhancing them that draws fresh attention to these monumental works and serves as the starting point for a broader reinterpretation of the artist’s body of work.
To mark the tenth anniversary of Giuseppe Spagnulo’s death (2016–2026), CUBO is dedicating a wide-ranging monographic exhibition to him, which takes its starting point from these very two works to highlight their enduring power. The exhibition traces the creative journey of a sculptor who was able to transform the manual skills he learnt as a child in his father’s pottery workshop in Grottaglie into a forming thought: a way of understanding sculpture capable of uniting earth and metal, gesture and reflection, matter and space.
Across the indoor and outdoor spaces of CUBO at Porta Europa, sculptures, projects, works on paper, models and lesser-known archive materials engage in a dialogue with the silent yet powerful presence of Turris and Paesaggio. The exhibition itinerary captures the essence of a body of work which, over time, has never ceased to question the meaning of verticality, the value of place and the possibility of transforming space through art.
For, as Spagnulo said, every tower is a lighthouse: a form capable of generating light from the bowels of the earth and projecting it towards the sky, a promise of an arrival that is ever postponed. In this suspended moment, characterized by resilience and possibility, the exhibition invites us to look anew – from near and far – at two works that have been part of Bologna’s landscape for over forty years and continue to embody a central question in Spagnulo’s practice: what does it mean, even today, to give form to thought?