Galleria Anna Marra, attiva dal 2013 a Roma (Via Sant’Angelo in Pescheria 32), offre una programmazione definita con curatori internazionali per valorizzare talenti emergenti e mid-career. Pur attenta all’arte italiana, la galleria punta a presentare ricerche internazionali. Con questo intento ha ampliato negli anni la sua offerta con artisti provenienti da Stati Uniti, Sud America, Africa e Medio Oriente, in un’ottica di costante confronto e arricchimento culturale.
Abroad, I often perceive a greater intellectual curiosity, an almost instinctive openness to what is new and experimental. There, collectors are generally more accustomed to taking risks, to seeking out the unfamiliar even before what is already established.
In Rome, that is precisely the challenge: to unsettle a certain cultural resistance and train the collector’s eye to engage with languages that do not belong to our tradition. In a city that is, by definition, an open-air museum, the contemporary artist lives in constant and almost overwhelming comparison with the ancient — a stratification of beauty so absolute that it often makes it difficult for those creating today to stand out and make their voice heard without being swallowed by it.
Running a gallery here therefore means not simply exhibiting works, but building a bridge of trust so that collectors feel ready to invest in global perspectives and shifting identities, such as those expressed by African and Middle Eastern diasporas. These are bold lines of inquiry that elsewhere might be received naturally, but here must carve out their space among the giants of the past, offering a vision of the world that is at last plural and contemporary.
Galleria Anna Marra, active in Rome since 2013 (Via Sant’Angelo in Pescheria 32), presents a program shaped in collaboration with international curators in order to support emerging and mid-career talents. While remaining attentive to Italian art, the gallery is committed to presenting international research. With this aim, over the years it has expanded its program to include artists from the United States, South America, Africa, and the Middle East, within a framework of constant dialogue and cultural enrichment.
Photo © Sebastiano Luciano
Since 2013, the art world has become far more fluid and interconnected, but also more aware of its own historical gaps. When I opened the gallery, the narrative was still largely Eurocentric. Today, we are witnessing a necessary “decolonization” of the gaze: there is a hunger for different stories, plural identities, and geographies that were once considered peripheral. My gallery has evolved in response to this urgency: we have moved from a more traditional program to a rigorous exploration of multiple identities in motion — from African and Middle Eastern diasporas to research emerging from South America — bringing to Rome plural voices and visions that ten years ago struggled to find space in private galleries.
Rome is a city that often absorbs change more slowly than the major capitals of the contemporary art world, but when it does, it does so with surprising depth. At the beginning, presenting international artists engaged with strong geopolitical themes was a gamble: the local collecting scene tended to be more conservative. Today, however, I sense a shift: there is a new generation of collectors, along with a maturation among the more established ones, who have come to understand that art is not only decoration or a safe investment, but also a tool for reading the present.
My path in art did not begin in an academic way, but through a long practice of looking and a deep passion. For over twenty years I worked on market dynamics in Antitrust, an experience that gave me a rigorous analytical structure, which I always nurtured in parallel through collecting.
The real turning point came through my collaboration with a historic figure such as Mara Coccia. With her, between 2008 and 2012, I experienced an extraordinarily vibrant period: the experience of Via del Vantaggio was my “school in the field.” There I learned how to manage dialogue with masters such as Staccioli, Mondino, and Zorio, and how to engage with public institutions — from the Calcografia Nazionale to the GNAM. It was a fundamental training ground for understanding that a gallery is not only a place of sale, but a center of cultural production.
When in 2013 I decided to open my own space in the heart of Rome’s Ghetto, I did so with a new awareness. I wanted Galleria Anna Marra to be a place where that historical solidity could meet the urgency of the present.
I shape the gallery’s program through an ongoing dialogue between the physical space and the urgency of the themes being addressed. The gallery is located in the heart of Rome’s ancient Jewish Ghetto, yet its interiors are defined by a minimal, rigorously contemporary architecture: this deliberately designed “void” is essential to me, because it welcomes and amplifies the force of the languages we choose to exhibit.
The selection of artists never happens in isolation, but is the result of close collaboration with internationally renowned curators who share my vision of the gallery as a place of geopolitical and social inquiry. Working with professionals of the caliber of Larry Ossei-Mensah (formerly Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Curator-at-Large at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), Alessandro Romanini (co-curator of the Ivory Coast Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale), and Silvia Cirelli (Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Creative Emergencies and curator of Biennale Donna at the Art Museum of the city of Ravenna) allows me to engage with narratives that extend beyond European borders.
