Lucca Art Fair | Programme

Let’s Get Lost is the theme of Lucca Art Fair 2026: an invitation to get lost as a conscious gesture, capable of opening up new perspectives of interpretation and experience.

The theme draws inspiration from the figure of the legendary jazz musician Chet Baker, whose biography is also connected to the city of Lucca, where he was imprisoned for a period in the early 1960s. This episode is taken symbolically as the starting point for a broader reflection on disorientation—not as loss, but as a generative and transformative condition.

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Inspired by Chet Baker’s imagery and his Lucchese trajectory, Let’s Get Lost embraces disorientation as a device: suspending the automatism of perception and renegotiating the codes through which we read artworks, bodies, and cities, activating a form of estrangement—in the sense articulated by Viktor Shklovsky—that shifts expectations and restores attention to what habit tends to render invisible.

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Lucca Art Fair 2026 thus takes shape as an open score, in which different voices, languages, and perspectives compose a dynamic and plural experience, capable of generating new trajectories of meaning and new ways of encountering artworks, audiences, and the city.

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Public Programme 

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PERFORMANCE

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Friday, 25 September 2026, at 6.00 pm, Dimitri Grechi Espinoza will take centre stage at Lucca Art Fair with a sound performance from the series Love Is a Losing Game. A saxophonist and composer, Grechi develops a musical practice in which jazz encounters traditional cultures, spirituality and an exploration of the acoustic qualities of space. Through an ongoing process of research, the artist reinterprets some of the jazz standards closest to him, distilling their melodies to their purest essence. Sound thus moves through the fair’s spaces and becomes living matter, creating an intimate, suspended listening experience in dialogue with memory, loss and the present. In relation to the theme of this edition, Let’s Get Lost, the performance invites audiences to abandon the usual coordinates of listening, transforming disorientation into an opportunity to open themselves to new forms of perception.

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Lucca Art Fair | Cloister B, Real Collegio | Friday, 25 September, 6.00 pm

 

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EXHIBITION

Giuseppe Chiari. ART IS EASY

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To mark the centenary of Giuseppe Chiari’s birth (Florence, 26 September 1926–9 May 2007), Lucca Art Fair is presenting an exhibition dedicated to the artist, curated by ArmandaGoriArte. The anniversary holds particular significance as it falls precisely during the tenth edition of the fair, transforming the exhibition into a fitting tribute to one of the most radical and innovative figures in Italian art of the second half of the twentieth century.

A musician, artist and theorist, Chiari explored the realms of experimental music, performance and the visual arts, constantly challenging the boundaries between disciplines. A leading Italian figure in Fluxus, he transformed the musical score into a visual space, the act of performance into artistic action, and musical instruments into objects to be questioned and reinvented. In his work, words, signs, erasures, collages and staves combine to liberate music from the conventions of traditional notation and performance.

The exhibition brings together a selection of works created between the 1960s and the 2000s. The exhibition brings together a selection of works created between the 1960s and the 2000s. Musical scores, graphic interventions, photographic transfers, collages, and works on panel show how musical language becomes the material of the image. Brief conceptual statements, signs and chromatic interventions do not illustrate sound, but extend its possibilities within the space of art and the viewer’s experience.

The exhibition thus offers a focused perspective on Chiari’s contribution to contemporary visual culture: a practice grounded in freedom, participation and the transcendence of all predetermined codes. The project also renews Lucca Art Fair’s commitment to rediscovering key figures of twentieth-century Italian art, placing the artist’s historic work in dialogue with the contemporary practices presented at the fair.

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Curated by ArmandaGoriArte

Lucca Art Fair | Museum Room, Real Collegio | 25–27 September 2026

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TALK

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The Lucca Art Fair talks will contribute to the Public Programme, featuring publishers from the Editor section. All participants will have the opportunity to present their work through a series of talks taking place throughout Saturday, 26, and Sunday, 27 September, providing a space for exchange and direct dialogue with the public.

Alongside the events devoted to publishing, the series of talks entitled “Art, Business and Foundations: Strategic Alliances in Contemporary Cultural Production” will continue. Launched during the previous edition of the fair, the series explores a crucial issue for the present and future of the art world.

Scheduled for Saturday, 26 September at 3.30 pm, the talk will feature Andrea Savino, a chartered accountant and statutory auditor specialising in international law and taxation, and Valentina Ciarallo, curator, art historian and lecturer at IED – Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome, who will examine the impact of art on businesses.

The conference talk will explore how art, collecting and patronage can generate economic development and social value for the local area. Promoted by Lucca Art Fair under the patronage of Confindustria Toscana Nord – Lucca, Pistoia and Prato, the initiative aims to foster new synergies between the public and private sectors and strengthen the role of culture as a strategic driver of local competitiveness.

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Lucca Art Fair | Talk Room, Real Collegio | 26–27 September 2026