Galleria del Premio Suzzara

The Museum was founded in 2002, but its roots go back to the first Suzzara Prize, established in 1948. Conceived by Dino Villani - among the fathers of Italian advertising - with the support of the mayor Thebes Mignoni and of Cesare Zavattini, the Prize immediately stands out for its originality.

The jury consisted not only of gallery owners, historians and art critics, but also of a worker, a clerk and a farmer. Even the prizes broke the mould: not money, but products of the land or manufacturing work. It was a gesture with a strong symbolic value, which put artistic work and peasant and worker work on an equal footing.

The orientation towards a realist line involved artists such as Renato Guttuso, Armando Pizzinato, Giuseppe Zigaina, Aligi Sassu e Giulio Turcato, accompanying the social transformations of the 1960s between economic boom and civic engagement.

In 1975, the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea was founded, which initiated a path partly distant from realism, opening up a dialogue with protagonists of contemporary art such as Mauro Staccioli, Giosetta Fioroni e Gianni Colombo.

Since 2002, with the establishment of the Suzzara Prize Gallery Museum, this extraordinary heritage - now consisting of over a thousand works - has finally been made accessible to the public, consolidating the Museum's role as a place of memory, research and confrontation between art and society.