Introduction
Marco Goldin

A sense of gratitude. This is the feeling I experience and wish to express toward President Fedriga, Vice President Anzil, and the entire Regional Government of Friuli Venezia Giulia. For having allowed me to bring to completion such a complex and ambitious project, ever since the moment—long ago now—of its conception.
An exhibition born from the fascination and the resonance of a single word: border, which is also the guiding theme of the 2025 European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica and Gorizia together.
An exhibition remarkable in scope, with as many as 137 works, loaned by 41 museums and a few private collectors from both the United States and Europe. It takes place in the restored East Exedra, within the ducal complex of Villa Manin.

That word—border—expanded, amplified, carried also into the realms of silence, and finally turned from the singular to the plural, becomes the starting point of a journey through the most beautiful painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between Europe and America. From Turner and Friedrich to Diebenkorn and Wyeth, if we were to use a simple chronological compass stretched between the two continents. And in between, extraordinary marvels. Stories to tell and to love. Stories of painting like few others.

The exhibition does not rely on didactic or chronological juxtapositions. Instead, it seeks to follow the rhythm of a stronger heartbeat before the vastness of the universe—both outside and within us. This, and only this, has always been the way I love to tell the story of painting: without distinctions of genre, without fear of undertaking a long journey where borders sometimes seem to vanish altogether. And it is then that one understands how painting—with its images, with its colors—has always lived within each of us. It becomes impossible, then, not to tell its story.

Let us all now imagine together how much beauty will shine in the sixteen rooms of the Exedra. I was given the opportunity to conceive an exhibition built patiently, loan after loan, without haste and without shortcuts—over more than two years of work. An exhibition born of knowledge, study, and reading. Born of an emotion so intense—and without borders—toward painting.

See you at Villa Manin.