Villa Delizia at Centro Pecci: Lorenza Longhi Reworks Prato’s Textiles
What makes an object desirable? The material it is made of, the way it is displayed, the label on it, the setting around it, or simply the fact that someone decided it was worth something?
It is one of the questions running through Villa Delizia, the show by Lorenza Longhi at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato’s contemporary art museum, on view from September 19, 2026 through January 10, 2027. Curated by Michele Bertolino, it is the first solo show devoted to the artist by an Italian institution.
Born in Lecco in 1991, Longhi has spent the past few years building a practice that moves freely between art, design, fashion, industrial production and material culture. At the center of her work are materials and objects that already exist, which the artist salvages and recombines in new ways. Fine fabrics, offcuts, mass-produced items and handmade finishes can share the same piece, losing the function they were made for and taking on a different meaning.
The way she works follows the same freedom. Longhi uses craft and do-it-yourself techniques, experimenting with stencils, salvaged fragments and screen prints laid straight onto the materials. The process does not have to end in something flawless: mistakes, overlaps and small variations are welcomed and can become part of the piece. It is through these steps that common or already used materials are transformed and take on a new identity.
The Prato connection
In Prato this research finds particularly fertile ground in the city’s relationship with textiles. For some of the large canvases made specifically for Villa Delizia, Longhi used fabrics from mills in the area, among them Cangioli 1859 and Tessilfibre, then working them with prints, overlays and flocking produced together with Floccatura Balmar.
Longhi takes this material and cuts off its usual path: the fabric leaves the production chain and walks into the museum, losing the function it was made for.
Simpler things find their way in as well, such as beads and sequins bought in shops around town. Prato, then, is not only the city hosting the show: its textile district, its processes and its materials become a concrete part of the work and of the transformation through which Longhi builds Villa Delizia.
An exhibition that reshapes the museum
The same logic is applied to the spaces of Centro Pecci. In the Ala Nio wing Longhi works on elements that are already there without altering the architecture: she takes on the building’s distinctive circular skylights, covers the museum’s historic sofas and uses trimmings, cushions, seating, window decals and a fabric portal to shape the route. Even the light fixtures designed by Maurice Nio are reinterpreted through decoration and materials. The result is a space where the line between artwork and display is harder to draw: what we normally read as the functional part of a museum is pulled into the artist’s work and changes the way we look at the room.
Visiting Villa Delizia
Lorenza Longhi. Villa Delizia, curated by Michele Bertolino, is on view at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Viale della Repubblica 277 in Prato, through January 10, 2027.
While the show is up there are also two special guided tours, part of Centro Pecci P.O.V. – Point Of View, the series that invites people from different fields to walk visitors through an exhibition with their own eyes.
On Saturday, November 14 at 6pm the tour will be led by Marta Franceschini, a researcher and historian of fashion and design, who will read the show through its materials, its textiles and the way they are made.
On Saturday, January 9 at 6pm it will be Carmen Gallo, a poet and a finalist for the Premio Strega Poesia 2026, Italy’s leading poetry award, taking the audience in a different direction, closer to the poetic side of Longhi’s work and to the way it transforms space.
