Aruch, 2013-2014

tube-shaped iron Ø800×15 cm
Private collection, Villa Aruch, Florence, Italy

Aruch is the work that Mauro Staccioli has devised and made for Villa Aruch in Florence. The sculpture is situated on a buttress on the walls surrounfing the villa. Its helicoidal movement, created by twisting and welding a steel cylinder, golden with rust, frames the facade from the outside, and from the inside stands out against the palazzi of Firenze Nova, taking the gaze up towards the sky.
The sculpture came into being during the work to renovate Villa Aruch, stemming from the impression that the villa’s long history made on Staccioli:”…A little further aheada decrepit and abandoned building is what remains of Villa Aruch, which in the fourteenth century was owned by the Adimari familu, then the Pitti family, the monks of SS. Annunziata and then the Orlandini Del Beccuto family. Among the worn and broken stonework some beautiful decorations can be made ut that adorned the building in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries…”
The villa’s name derives from the property’s most recent owner, Isaac Aruch, distinguished professor of veterinary medicine and there he died in 1937. Known for years by the name “La Casaccia” owing to its prolonged state of decay, the recent renovation work has enabled it to be transformed into a house containing holiday apartments, and the new owners asked Staccioli to make a sculpture that could be the place’s stamp and hallmark.
What Staccioli has created is a brand new form, with regard to his previous work, from the outset designed to stand out against Villa Aruch. The sculpture was first presented in 2013 at Castello di Racconigi on occasion of the International Sculpture Biennal and a larger version in black steel is on display at Chateau de Seneffe neat Brussels in Belgium.”