THOMAS J PRICE IN FLORENCE – TIME UNFOLDING

The British sculptor Thomas J Price has been invited to create a monumental sculpture for the modern-day agorá that is Piazza della Signoria, where the most famous masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture stand — from the copy of Michelangelo’s David to Baccio Bandinelli’s Heracles and Cacus, Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus, Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines, and Ammannati’s stunning Neptune Fountain, to the equestrian monument of Cosimo I by Giambologna, and Donatello’s replica of Judith.

Piazza della Signoria
14.03 – 14.09.2025

Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento
14.03 – 11.06.2025

For the first time, a contemporary young woman appears as the protagonist, ‘immortalized’ in a pose that is far from heroic or terrible, but one of everyday normalcy, almost detached from the imaginary world dominated by rhetorical figures, ancient mythologies, biblical characters, and symbolic devices that were meant to represent and celebrate power and the enemy. Thomas J Price’s work is a significant conversation with the canons and aesthetic models that have defined the history of Western art for centuries, and which have been considered timeless and non-negotiable with other cultures. His language, radically contemporary, appropriates these ‘ideal’ forms to regenerate them, entrusting them with the celebration of identity in a public space that is also an open-air museum. For the first time in 600 years, the figure of a young woman of our time rises here: an image of everyday life that dialogues with heroic, biblical, or mythological figures. Her monumental size, posture, and gestures, the golden bronze, and the fact that she is not installed on a pedestal but rests directly on the stones of the square, places her in an ‘other’ dimension, creating a short circuit between the passage of time (Time Unfolding, the title of the work) of life and sociality and the immobile eternity of the Renaissance sculptures that dominate the Piazza della Signoria scene. The statue does not have a base: her feet, wearing simple sandals, rest on the paving stones. Anyone is free to interpret her looking at her phone as they wish: perhaps reading the news of what is happening in the world, perhaps looking at a map trying to orient themselves, reading an insight about one of the works in the Loggia dei Lanzi, or learning more about Thomas J Price’s work. This is not a figure attuned to the past or supernatural worlds, but one connected to the present. It is not a provocation but an unexpected presence, but real, that connects with the artistic stratification process—a defining quality of Piazza della Signoria—giving life to a relay between languages and styles. Time does not stop at the past, and the history of art continues to flow, embracing the cosmopolitan present, forcing it, anticipating it.

Thomas J Price
Time Unfolding
2025
bronze / bronze
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth