(Finance) – UniCredit announces its strategy to make art accessible to all, drawing on the bank’s long tradition of supporting arts and culture. One of the key initiatives announced today is the launch of the new UniCredit Art Collection website, which will open the doors of the bank to the world for the first time. It’s about one of the largest corporate art collections in Europeae includes over 200 works and more than 100 artists from collections in Austria, Germany and Italy, including Giacomo Balla, Georg Baselitz, Pizzi Cannella, Antonio Donghi, Dan Flavin, Jakob Gasteiger, Hans Hartung, Axel Hu¨tte, Cornelius Vo¨lker and Walter Pichler.
The collection was born from the passion for art shared by Italy, Austria and Germany, whose assets make up the majority of the collection, but has progressively expanded to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The collection spans a wide range of periods, from the Old Masters to a modern international dimension with works from the second half of the 20th century, with strong territorial ties closely linked to the historical roots of each geographical area in which UniCredit operates.
Digital is a fundamental part of UniCredit’s transformation journey and this new platform leverages the bank’s digital infrastructure to share these masterpieces with a wider audience and make the bank’s artistic heritage accessible. This online gallery also includes an educational section to inspire children and adults to learn about artists and their works.
This is accompanied by a program of exhibitions curated by prominent personalities, thematic collections, interviews with artists and updates on exhibitions and museum loans. UniCredit’s works of art are displayed in offices, branches and museums around the world and in the first half of 2023 UniCredit managed 6 short-term loans with 6 different institutions across the country, involving 26 works of art. UniCredit has also entered into a series of sponsorship agreements with high-profile artistic institutions, including the Verona Arena, the Filarmonica della Scala in Milan and the Teatro San Carlo in Naples.
To celebrate the launch of this strategy and the digitization of its art collection, UniCredit has brought together a selection of works for an exhibition entitled “Inversamente”. The exhibition curated by the former Director of MAXXI 2016-2023 (National Museum of 21st Century Arts), Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, ranges from the art of the early Sixties to the beginning of the new millennium, combining works by some of the major protagonists of the scene modern and contemporary art, such as Hans Hartung, Mario Schifano, Gerhard Richter and Shirin Neshat.