.Prada dresses up

Prada  – the devil's favourite fashion brand according to a film and a book – is launching a giant multi-disciplinary arts complex on the edge of Milan that it hopes will attract tens of thousands of visitors a year.

The Italian fashion house opened the 19,000-square-metre headquarters for its art foundation on May 2 in a century-old former distillery that’s been transformed and extended by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.

Koolhaas has added three new buildings to the existing structure: an exhibition pavilion, a tower and a cinema. A mixed programme of art exhibitions, movie screenings and philosophy projects is planned. The inaugural exhibition of classical sculpture comes with an appearance by filmmaker Roman Polanski, who will present a documentary and a series of screenings looking back on the directors who influenced him most.

The Fondazione Prada also boasts a bar designed by Wes Anderson, director of the award-winning film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, who has modelled it after historic Milanese cafes.

“There is no museum of contemporary art in Milan and no real dedication from the municipality to promote such art,” says Astrid Welter, director of the Fondazione Prada. “This is why it was seen as a necessity to come in with an offering.”

Every other year Italy stages the world’s biggest art exhibition – the Venice Biennale – hosting a roster of cutting-edge artists from around the world. Yet the government has otherwise been slow to embrace contemporary art within its museums and institutions. It was not until May 2010 that the country got its first national museum of contemporary art, Rome’s Maxxi.

Private firms and individuals have stepped in to fill the gap. Prada started its contemporary-art foundation in 1993, staging exhibitions and events in Milan, Venice and elsewhere. Since 2004, Pirelli, the world’s fifth-largest tyre maker, has staged exhibitions in a 15,000-square-metre former locomotive-parts factory outside Milan.

Hangar Bicocca, as it is now known, has a 2015 budget of 3.5 million euros (Bt134 million), and in the past decade has hosted shows by such big names as Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramovic and France’s Christian Boltanski.

While Hangar Bicocca lacks a collection of its own, Prada co-founders Miuccia Prada and Fabrizio Bertelli own a substantial number of artworks that their foundation’s curators will draw on to put together exhibitions, Welter says. The collection includes post-war European and American art by such artists as Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and Walter De Maria.