Igor Mitoraj Museum in Pietrasanta

In Pietrasanta, in the heart of Versilia, contemporary art has a new home and a new narrative. The Igor Mitoraj Museum, housed in the former municipal market on Via Oberdan, opens to the public as a permanent space dedicated to one of the most recognizable and poetic sculptors on the international scene.

Pietrasanta, which for decades has been an open-air creative workshop and a meeting place for artists from around the world, thus reinforces its identity as “Little Athens” with a museum that is not merely an exhibition space but a genuine dialog between materials, memory and the local area.

The new museum exhibition is the result of a donation of 69 works by Jean-Paul Sabatié, the artist’s heir and current president of the foundation that bears his name. This extraordinary collection offers a journey through Mitoraj’s creative universe in all its complexity, its constellations being sculptures in marble, bronze and resin, along with jewelry that reveals the same poetic tension as his monumental works.

The building that once housed the municipal market has been transformed—thanks to the work of the architects at OBR—into a contemporary exhibition space under the direction of Architect Frank Boehm. The new architectural layout retains a connection to the building’s original function yet transforms it into a place of contemplation and aesthetic exploration, where light and space exalt the experience of the artworks.

Inside, following the exhibition route of “Mitoraj. Present,” visitors encounter a body of work that captures the essence of Mitoraj’s artistic exploration. In the fragmented classical figure, the ancient face that takes on a contemporary form and the body that conveys the fragility of time. Among his most significant works is Bocca della Rocca Bianca, a sculpture in white Apuan marble created in 1985 and weighing nearly 110 pounds or 50 kilograms.

Igor Mitoraj chose Pietrasanta as a place to live and work, finding a unique creative environment in the marble workshops and landscape of Versilia. It was here that he carved out a fundamental part of his artistic career, and it is here that he rests, as per his wishes.

Today, this new museum presents that relationship in a public and permanent form, transforming personal memory into collective heritage, with the aim of being a new hub for contemporary art in Tuscany, capable of attracting visitors, scholars and enthusiasts from all over the world. Not just a museum but a place where sculpture once again becomes a physical experience, a presence, an encounter.