Pretenzione Intenzione: Objects of Beauty and Bewilderment from the Archive of Harald Szeemann

The legendary Swiss art historian and curator Harald Szeemann (1933–2005) is known for his innovative and generationally groundbreaking exhibition making practice. This can be seen in projects such as Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Forms (1969, Kunsthalle Bern) and documenta 5 (1972, Kassel), both of which championed artists experimenting outside the confines of traditional art historical categories and narratives. As part of his intellectual and curatorial practice, Szeemann was an obsessive collector. After his death, his archive was bequeathed to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and, in part, to the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland, where he lived and worked. However, a number of Szeemann’s objects escaped the process of cataloging and acquisition and were left behind in his studio workspace and archive known as Fabbrica Rosa (“Pink Factory”), near the city of Locarno in southern Switzerland. These strange and indecipherable items (ranging from a black flag to a silver spoon encased in resin, a beaded crucifix, and a Polaroid of the curator’s left eye) were a small part of what Szeemann called his Museum of Obsessions, traces of a physical as well as mental landscape of artistic thoughts, philosophies, and concepts that manifested itself through Szeemann’s myriad projects (both realized and unrealized) and in the spaces he inhabited.

In 2015, Szeemann’s daughter, the artist Una Szeemann, turned these leftover and forgotten objects into an exhibition, Pretenzione Intenzione. Presented first in the empty spaces of the Fabbrica Rosa after his archive had left the building, it was staged again last summer in Szeemann’s beloved Monte Verità, which had been a meeting place for artists, writers, and supporters of various alternative movements in the first decades of the twentieth century, and is located only a few miles away from where he lived and worked. She subsequently published a book under the same title in 2025, in which she invited a wide range of thinkers—a poet, an artist, art historians, an anthropologist, a playwright—to embark on a series of archaeological reveries as they considered these objects. Taking its title from a puzzling doodle found on a piece of paper in Szeemann’s archive, Pretenzione Intenzione (translated in English as “Pretension Intention”) suggests that an inquisitive openness lies at the heart of this collection. Following the Getty’s presentation of Szeemann’s archive in the exhibition Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions in 2018, Marciano Art Foundation is excited to present these sister objects in Los Angeles where they will live for a while, inviting us all to weave our own daydreams and stories from their alluring forms.

Pretenzione Intenzione: Objects of Beauty and Bewilderment from the Archive of Harald Szeemann is a project by artist Una Szeemann. The presentation at Marciano Art Foundation (MAF) is organized by MAF Director Hanneke Skerath and independent curator and writer Douglas Fogle.

Generous support provided by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Tickets are available for Pretenzione Intenzione, on view through April 18, 2026.