By Jelizaveta Demcakova and Diana Cuza. Cover images Bunker Galleria
There are countless ways to experience Florence’s artistic soul — from grand museums to the quiet poetry of its ateliers — yet some corners of the city offer rarer forms of beauty. Hidden behind an unassuming door on Via San Gallo, Bunker Galleria reveals one of these precious enclaves: a place where architecture, art, and design converge in an evolving dialogue.
Founded in 2018 by Cosimo Bonciani and Niccolò Antonielli, Bunker Studio Firenze has become a benchmark of innovation and material sensibility within Italy’s cultural landscape. The studio’s projects — spanning residential, retail, and hospitality — bridge aesthetic experimentation with functional balance, earning recognition in major international design publications.
In June 2024, the two architects extended their vision by opening Bunker Galleria, a space devoted to experimentation and cross-pollination between creative disciplines. “Every project we develop, whether architectural or artistic, questions how space can shape experience,” says Bonciani. “The gallery was born from the desire to make that question visible, tangible, and open to interpretation.”
Here, architecture is not a backdrop but a counterpart — a living framework in which ideas, materials, and gestures meet. Alongside its exhibitions and events, Bunker Edizioni produces a collection of design objects crafted with Italian artisans, blending tradition and innovation in a vision deeply rooted in contemporary culture.
Scatola Bianca: How Bunker Galleria’s First Exhibition Reimagines the White Cube
It is from this same vision that Scatola Bianca emerged — the gallery’s first exhibition and a meditation on how we experience and display art.
“Often, we think that art needs neutral, white, minimalist spaces so that the work can stand out on its own,” says Bonciani. “But white is not absence — it’s the sum of possibilities, a living presence that co-creates the work. It may appear as emptiness, but in truth, it is an embryo, a generative force, a promise of all possibilities.”
Scatola Bianca reimagines the “white cube” not as an invisible container but as an organism — breathing, reactive, and generative. The project, Bonciani explains, “was born from our visitors. They often told us, ‘You’re not a white-box gallery…’ That comment sparked a reflection: how much does the space influence the artwork, and how much does the artwork reshape the space that contains it?”
Far from sterile minimalism, the exhibition stages a dialogue between two rooms: one dark and immersive, the other luminous and expansive. In the first, deep brown walls embrace delicate, pale-toned works in a hushed intimacy; in the second, everything opens into a buttery-white expanse where light, color, and materiality converge. “The contrast between light and darkness generates a shared rhythm,” Bonciani notes. “Here, white reacts and grows with the artworks, turning space into a living experience.”
Scatola Bianca at Bunker Galleria: Artists Share the Stories Behind Their Work
Within this suspended architecture, each artist reinterprets the relationship between space and perception through a distinctive, yet interconnected sensibility.
Andrea Barzaghi: Exploring the Human Journey in Uomo con Missione
The exhibition at Bunker galleria opens with Andrea Barzaghi, whose Uomo con missione depicts a solitary figure crossing the forest — not a hero, but what the artist calls “a universal human being confronting his limits to encounter himself.” His forest becomes both labyrinth and mirror, a threshold between the visible and the invisible.
Samuele Alfani Reimagines Memory as Spatial Experience
From that inward passage, the viewer enters Samuele Alfani’s realm of memory. His large-scale painting Asa Nisi Masa unfolds like a dream sequence — corridors, stairways, and suspended figures recalling Fellini’s cinematic subconscious. “I’m not seeking an answer,” Alfani explains, “but an access — a way into that world of interrupted memories and suspended emotions.” His work transforms recollection into architecture, the unconscious into spatial experience.
Erik Saglia: Geometry in Motion at Scatola Bianca
Structure turns into vibration in Erik Saglia’s geometric cosmogonies, where circles and lines pulse in rhythmic tension. “The immense possibilities of technological progress,” he notes, “return to us as visions — echoes of landscapes that oscillate between the artificial and the organic.” His compositions transform geometry into energy, pulling the viewer into a hypnotic field between calculation and emotion.
Inside Samuele Bartolini’s Paintings: Pastel Tones With a Dark Edge
This sense of oscillation continues in Samuele Bartolini’s paintings, which balance irony and unease. Works such as Stuck Swan and Monumento equestre seduce with pastel tones and gentle surfaces, only to reveal a quiet fracture underneath. “Behind their sweetness lies something unresolved,” the artist says. His images speak of beauty as both attraction and threat — a tenderness that masks its own disturbance.
Rikyboy at Bunker Galleria: Circo Rurale Brings Circus Life to Canvas
A different nostalgia animates Rikyboy (Riccardo Sala)’s Circo Rurale series, where the faded magic of the circus merges with the rural landscapes of Brianza. “I wanted to celebrate the spectacle of everyday life,” he explains, “a world that is both festive and solitary — poetic in its fragility.” His canvases turn collective memory into emotional theatre, where popular imagery meets existential reflection.
Cosimo Casoni: Memory, Movement, and Fragile Harmony in L’attracco
Cosimo Casoni brings the dialogue full circle with L’attracco, a work that fuses landscape, movement, and gesture. The painted view of Arbatax — rendered with post-Macchiaioli slowness — collides with the physical trace of a skateboard passing across the canvas. Shoelaces painted in trompe-l’œil and a sailboat made of grip tape become symbols of precarious balance, where memory and motion, past and present, coexist in fragile harmony.
How Scatola Bianca’s Sculptures Turn Bunker Galleria Into a Living Space
The second part of Scatola Bianca opens to a different physical rhythm — one defined by the sculptural presences of Cleo Fariselli, Lea Mugnaini, and Alice Ronchi, whose works emerge directly from the floor, rejecting the traditional pedestal to inhabit the gallery as living bodies.
Fariselli’s Dancing: When Mirrors Become Living Art
In Fariselli’s Dancing, a sphere of fractured mirrors hovers in midair, scattering light across the room in unpredictable patterns. “It’s a celestial body,” she says, “that fascinates and unsettles — a reflection of our own contradictions.” The work’s shimmering fragments transform instability into radiance.
Lea Mugnaini: Sculpting the Universal Through the Female Form
Lea Mugnaini’s Stilla Mundi embodies a quieter gravity. “A drop of the world,” she describes, “where the infinitely small contains the universal.” Her bronze sculpture turns the female figure into a cosmic archetype, a meditation on creation as both material and spiritual act — dense yet fluid, ancient yet alive.
Alice Ronchi: Balance and Stillness in Contemporary Sculpture
Closing the exhibition, Alice Ronchi introduces a work that balances formal precision with poetic restraint. Her essential geometries — curves, voids, and suspended planes — shape silence into presence. “These presences invite the visitor to feel the space rather than just look at it,” observes Bonciani. While Fariselli explores fragmentation and Mugnaini ascension, Ronchi seeks equilibrium — a stillness where air itself becomes form.
The White Cube Reimagined — Scatola Bianca Turns Space Into Experience
Ultimately, the Scatola Bianca exhibition at Bunker Gallera is a question — a meditation on how space defines perception and how art, in turn, redefines space. “Every environment has a voice,” Bonciani concludes, “even when it tries to hide it. White is not neutral — it’s alive, generative, in motion. In the end, it’s the space that asks how to host the artwork. And perhaps, in that continuous exchange between form, color, and gaze, lies the most vital part of the exhibition.”
