The must-see exhibitions and events in October

Milano: “Jimmy Nelson - Portrait of Humanity"

From October 19 to November 5, 2023, Portrait Milano welcomes the art of Jimmy Nelson, the celebrated British photographer who has dedicated his career to endangered indigenous people for more than 30 years. Never-before-seen content complements the artist’s retrospective, already exhibiting at Palazzo Reale until January 21, 2024. Outside the immersive rooms of Palazzo Reale, the images find a second open-air setting at Portrait Milano. The Humanity exhibition is duplicated in a spin-off project entitled “Portrait of Humanity” hosted in the majestic Piazza del Quadrilatero, where 18 portraits tell incredible stories of distant people and faces, of life, humanity and philanthropy, but also the story of the artist himself, who met, knew and observed these populations before he was able to capture their emotions and essence in a shot.

Where: Portrait Milano, Piazza del Quadrilatero
When: Until 5 November 2023

Roma: “Francesco Arena - Il fulmine governa ogni cosa"

The Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio is hosting, until 7 December 2023, Francesco Arena's new solo exhibition, the second appointment of the #Project Room programme in the Via Crispi spaces in Rome, conceived by Nicola Del Roscio and curated by Davide Pellicciari and Carlotta Spinelli. Some of the characters that Francesco Arena has chosen or rediscovered in multiple contexts over the time, recur in the project "Il fulmine governa ogni cosa": from Martin Heidegger to Glenn Gould, from Jacques-Louis David to Cy Twombly, from Paul Engelmann to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ranging from philosophy, to music, to visual arts, the range of characters embraces the whole world of knowledge. The title refers to a famous quote by Heraclitus that was inscribed on the lintel of the entrance door of Heidegger's famous hütte in Todtnauberg, rebuilt in real dimensions inside the space of the Foundation. The hütte, ideally related to the philosopher’s memory, is a work that contains a series of sculptures specifically created for this exhibition by the artist. As the audience enters the exhibition, the works are revealed, weaving a game of continuous cross-references and exchanges between container and content, visible and invisible, individual and collective experience. Through his multidisciplinary practice, Arena implements continuous and subtle references to contemporary society, highlighting the impossibility of being totally self-sufficient and how crucial is to have a support from others. 

Where: Fondazione Nicola del Roscio
When: Until 7 December 2023

Milano: “ZaLiZaZa. Inventario di famiglia"

Galleria Antonio Colombo presents the exhibition ZaLiZaZa. Inventario di famiglia, curated by Francesca Pellicciari, featuring a group of artists belonging to the same family: the photographer Miro Zagnoli (Za), the artist Emi Ligabue (Li) and their two daughters: the illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli (Za), already connected with the gallery, and the costume designer Emilia Zagnoli (Za). The members of ZaLiZaZa are a very modern family, but also one of days gone by: each in his or her own field – contiguous and often overlapping ambits – constantly coming to grips with their own research and experimentation, relying on a shared language, a true family lexicon. The exhibition pathway is an inventory of works of all kinds – drawings and photographs, wooden books, collages, object/sculptures, fabrics, screens and magic boxes – in an intense dialogue of correspondences, where the four voices alternate and take turns, without a chronological order; a dialogue accompanied by a selection of items (sketches, notes, postcards, family photos) that document a methodology, while at the same time emphasizing the constant presence of art in the private life of ZaLiZaZa.

Where: Galleria Antonio Colombo
When: Until 19 November 2023

Milano: “Ettore Sottsass Design Metaphors"

The series of exhibitions dedicated to Ettore Sottsass continues in the Sala Sottsass, home since January 2021 to the permanent installation of Casa Lana – the interior of a private residence designed by Sottsass around the mid-1960s in Milan, faithfully reconstructed at Triennale and accessible to the public thanks to a donation by Barbara Radice Sottsass. Design Metaphors is the fourth exhibition. It brings together a series of photographs taken by Sottsass between 1972 and 1978 on the subject of architecture, design and living.

Where: Triennale Milano
When: Until 21 April 2024

© Christian Rizzo
 

Roma: “Julian Opie - Walking figures"

A few more days to visit, at Galleria Valentina Bonomo in Rome,  Julian Opie’s solo exhibition, presenting his latest walking figures – thirteen works featuring human figures captured from reality. Each of them is unique, with a style all their own, expressed in their clothing, their movements and the objects they carry or simply by the accessories they wear. The works’ protagonists are caught going about their daily lives – these are people walking somewhere for a very specific reason, often clutching phones or reading an email. The artist develops and transforms his subjects, arriving at the essence of their forms via a process in which the marks he makes are reduced to a minimum. The result is works that may be stylised but lose nothing in terms of expressiveness or individuality, and whose freshness is rendered all the more emphatic by the extreme directness with which they present themselves to the viewer. Opie’s works, which have been described as modern icons of a generic and generalised existence, turn a spotlight on questions associated with the psychology of perception and with knowledge-as-practice, delving into the ambiguities of the relationship linking reality and its totemic representations. The world Opie depicts, using digital technology, is effectively a meditation on the complex interplay between nature and artifice, and between signs/marks and reality as we observe and experience it.

Where: Galleria Valentina Bonomo
When: Until 15 October 2023

Milano: “James Lee Byars"

Pirelli HangarBicocca and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid) dedicate a retrospective to James Lee Byars, one of the most recognised American artists from the 1960s to the present, who has influenced an entire generation in the field of conceptual and performance art. The exhibition brings together large-scale works, created between 1974 and 1997 and coming from international museum collections, some rarely exhibited and presented in Italy for the first time, in which precious and refined materials, such as marble, velvet, silk, gold leaf and crystal, are harmoniously combined with minimal and archetypal geometries, such as prismatic spheres and pillars, and with baroque objects in a play of symbolic and aesthetic cross-references between form and content. Starting from the multiple allegorical and formal meanings of matter, the exhibition dwells on themes that have crossed the artist's practice such as the search for perfection, doubt as an approach to existence and the finitude of the human being, inviting visitors to reflect on the alchemical potential of art in shaping reality.

Where: Pirelli HangarBicocca
When: From 12 October 2023 to 18 February 2024

Lugano: “Da Albrecht Dürer a Andy Warhol. Capolavori dalla Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich"

The MASI in Lugano offers the public the opportunity to discover 300 masterpieces from one of the most important Swiss collections of prints and drawings, namely the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, one of the most important Swiss institutions for prints and drawings from the 15th century to the present day. Techniques, motifs, styles and conceptions of art over the centuries are presented in a chronological sequence, in which the works of leading exponents of European art history - from Albrecht Dürer to Rembrandt van Rijn, from Francisco de Goya to Maria Sibylla Merian, Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch - are presented alongside the works of living artists such as John M Armleder, Olivier Mosset, Candida Höfer, Susan Hefuna, Shirana Shahbazi or Christiane Baumgartner. Unexpected and surprising connections emerge from this rare and exceptional confrontation between the Old Masters and more contemporary creations: themes such as the process of creating the work of art, the relationship between copy and original, the transmission of motifs and iconographies, but also the collaboration between different professions in the field of art traverse the history of graphic art since its inception and touch on aspects that are still relevant today. The exhibition also presents drawings, photographs and multiples. The exhibition project also offers information and curiosities on the origins, functions and importance of the works through the centuries.

Where: Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Sede LAC
When: Until 7 January 2024

Milano: “Andrea Branzi - L’architettura appartiene al teatro"

Galleria Antonia Jannone dedicates a new exhibition to architect and designer Andrea Branzi, just passed away. As in a choreography inside an improvised theater where masks change shape and color, Branzi rediscovers the great masters of twentieth-century painting by transforming their creations in surprising ways. Puppets and marionettes, masks, puppets and marionettes tell the happy world of circus comedies and adventures. On display is the series of drawings from which it takes its title, a body of work created in the 2000s, including the sets of Casanova (2000) and Bluebeard (2002), the sculptures of the Buratti (2019-20), the drawings of the Filastrocche (2020) and the interpretations of the Maschere collection (2022-23). Accompanying the exhibition is Archetypes, which brings together the theoretical mental models that anticipate material creation and are part of the non-obvious anthropological heritage that lies in our unconscious. In architecture, these can be traced back to primary structures whose function is not defined in relation to living, but to building. In Branzi's view, "today, civil architecture is experiencing a crisis of credibility, in the sense that its relationship with society has gradually worn out; in turn, society is experiencing a deep crisis and is no longer able to provide value frameworks for the project." Thus archetypes can play the essential function of a repertoire to be invented anew. This section includes the previously unpublished series of drawings Torre Velasca (2023), inspired by modern Milanese architecture. 

Where: Antonia Jannone
When: Until 14 January 2024

Gallarate: “FASHION REPORT: da ALFA a MISSONI"

Until 22 October 2023, at MA*GA in Gallarate (VA) it is possible to visit FASHION REPORT: da ALFA a MISSONI, an exhibition project for the rearrangement of the Sala Arazzi Ottavio Missoni curated by the Missoni Archive. The exhibition is part of the programme of ARCHIVIFUTURI. Festival degli Archivi del Contemporaneo second edition, in which the Missoni Archives participated as the event venue, hosting a guided tour and an augmented reality experience, curated by artistic director Luca Missoni and manager Nicoletta Bettolini. The exhibition features 22 studio shots taken between 1967 and 1970 by Alfa Castaldi (pseudonym of Alfonso Castaldi, 1926 - 1995), considered among the fathers of Italian fashion photography. The images had been chosen and reprinted by the same artist in 1978 for a tribute to the Missoni family on the occasion of the 25th year of the Maison's activity. They are a full expression of the documentation of the affirmation of the Missoni Style: the first experiments with knitwear-woven and jacquard, mesh and zig-zag work, experiments with flamed yarn dyes, printed and flocked nude-look jerseys.

Where: MA*GA
When: Until 22 October 2023

Milano: “Quattro chiacchiere fra Matisse e Bonnard"

The Pinacoteca di Brera hosts Henri Matisse's masterpiece, Femme au violon from the Musée de L'Orangerie in Paris, which will be exhibited alongside Pierre Bonnard's Portrait of Marta Bonnard in a special "chat" between two artists who, as visitors will discover, had a special relationship with each other as well as shared pictorial characteristics and themes. From the Musée de L'Orangerie in Paris - where two portraits by Modigliani are on loan - the painting by Henri Matisse arrives in Brera. Alongside the painting by Pierre Bonnard, it is intended to bear witness to the close relationship, above all epistolary, established between two masters of the early 20th century avant-garde.

Where: Pinacoteca di Brera
When: Until 14 January 2024

Lecco: “NOVECENTO. Il ritorno alla figurazione da Sironi a Guttuso"

The exhibition cycle of Percorsi nel Novecento (Paths in the 20th Century) continues in Lecco, a programme conceived by the Direction of the Lecco Urban Museum System and entrusted for its design and realisation to ViDi Cultural, which will analyse the Italian cultural scene of the 20th century until November 2024. The new chapter in this narrative, after the exhibition that explored the Futurist universe, is on the calendar at Palazzo delle Paure until 26 November 2023, with NOVECENTO. Il ritorno alla figurazione da Sironi a Guttuso. The exhibition, curated by Simona Bartolena, produced and realised by ViDi cultural, in collaboration with the Municipality of Lecco and the Sistema Museale Urbano Lecchese, travel partner Trenord, presents over 60 works by artists such as Mario Sironi, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Felice Casorati, Arturo Martini, Giacomo Manzù, Mario Mafai, Renato Guttuso and many others who, in the period between the two wars, supported the Return to Order, i.e. the call for figuration without denying the spirit of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century of which they had been proponents. The itinerary is punctuated by insights into other contemporary creative expressions, from design to architecture, with the rise of Art Deco and Rationalism, from theatre to literature. Like the other exhibitions in the Palazzo delle Paure project, the exhibition will be accompanied by an important didactic-narrative apparatus, with historical notes, information and explanations with a popular slant.

Where: Palazzo delle Paure
When: Until 26 November 2023

Milano: “Mario Nigro - Opere 1947-1992"

The most extensive exhibition ever dedicated to Mario Nigro, a protagonist of the Italian 20th century art scene, is still on view at the Museo del Novecento until 5 November 2023. Promoted by Comune di Milano - Cultura, produced by Museo del Novecento, Palazzo Reale and Eight Art Project, the exhibition is realised in collaboration with the Archivio Mario Nigro and curated by Antonella Soldaini and Elena Tettamanti. More than one hundred and forty works from 1947 to the last one in 1992 are on display, including paintings, three-dimensional works, works on paper and a wide selection of documents. The exhibition includes works exhibited at the Venice Biennales of 1964, 1968, 1978, 1982, 1986 and at the X Quadriennale in Rome in 1973.  The exhibition marks different moments in Nigro's artistic language: from an experimental attitude starting in the 1940s to a decisive orientation towards abstract and geometric compositional structures.  The artist's works suggest a recurring narrative horizon based on 'rhythm', 'forms' and 'time', the result of a vision in which knowledge of music and scientific knowledge have a decisive influence.

Where: Museo del Novecento
When: Until 5 November 2023

Milano: “Joana Escoval - Armonia"

This is the second solo exhibition that the Vistamare gallery dedicates to Joana Escoval, a Portuguese artist whose practice, both visual and sound, includes sculptures, performances and installations. The exhibition presents a series of new research works that explore the synergies and interconnections that take on primordial natural forms. Metals, earth, water, wind, air and fire work together to form unique sculptures. The focus of the artist's investigation is, in fact, our relationship with the world we inhabit, as individuals ontologically interconnected with its original dimension. A connection that we also find in the exhibition space, where the artist, like a continuous flow, has connected the three rooms with different states of matter in motion. Fleeting and changeable, Escoval's work invites us on a journey along the boundaries of human consciousness, through a perception of things that must be felt and experienced and not just looked at.

Where: Vistamare Milano
When: Until 11 November 2023

Lago d’Orta: “SOS Humanity 2023"

The SOS Humanity exhibition, conceived and realised by the Fondazione Cavaliere del Lavoro Alberto Giacomini, returns to Lake Orta with a new edition even richer in works of art that dialogue with the territory, creating a unique hymn to Beauty, a hymn to eco-sustainability, where Art exalts the natural beauty of the place, redesigning the landscape, giving it new aesthetic nuances rich in content and meaning, which make us reflect on current social and environmental emergencies. Six artists (Helidon Xhixha, Omar Hassan, Silvia Della Rocca, Sergio Floriani, Simone Benedetto and Angelo Molinari) interpret the SOS Humanity 2023 launched by the Foundation by "aesthetically invading" with 29 works the most significant places on the lake, each bringing a different artistic message. The installations dialogue with the territory, enhancing its natural beauty, entering into a relationship and harmony with the environment that surrounds them. From Orta to Vacciago and Miasino, from Armeno to Pettenasco, from Omegna to Quarna, from Gozzano to San Maurizio up to Pella with its hamlets: a journey through Art to raise awareness of the social and environmental "emergencies" that are afflicting our future.

Where: Widespread locations
When: Until 1 November 2023

Milano: “Mariana Castillo Deball - Luce dietro tracce incompiute"

A textile installation by Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball, whose monumental dimensions welcome visitors into the heart of the museum, the Agora. As part of the museum's renewed vision of contemporary themes and practices, MUDEC presents its second site-specific project for autumn 2023, a prelude to the exhibition Exposure, scheduled for March 2024. Working with the collections of MUDEC and Fondazione Ratti, artist Mariana Castillo Deball selected twelve textile fragments from different eras, on the basis of which she then created her own watercolours. These images were then printed in large format on fabric and assembled with additional textile elements at the workshops of NABA - Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti - together with a group of students led by Salvatore Averzano. In this way, three-dimensional 'palimpsests' have been created that shine with different meanings and stories. For the first time, the intervention on the glass surface changes the very status of the architecture, transforming it into a reflective volume on which the sculptures, made of light, semi-transparent fabrics, appear. Natural light filters through this composition of textile fragments, creating a new cartography. A programme of guided tours of the collection's storerooms will allow the public to discover the museum pieces reinterpreted by Deball in his installation, recreating the often invisible link between exhibition space and museum heritage, which becomes accessible.  Curated by Katya Inozemtseva and Sara Rizzo with the support of 24 Ore Cultura and Fondazione Deloitte.

Where: MUDEC
When: From 19 October 2023 to 7 April 2024


 

Milano: “Serpenti 75 Years of Infinite Tales"

To celebrate Serpenti’s 75th anniversary, Bulgari launched Serpenti Factory, an international artistic initiative embracing many aspects of the emblem, joining together past, present and future. Bulgari continues its personal tribute to the city of Milan making it the star of the only European stage of this incredible journey. From 11th October to 19th November at the Dazio di Levante in Piazza Sempione it will be possible to admire the Serpenti 75 Years of Infinite Tales exhibition: a narrative journey through jewels, watches, videos and archive materials. For the occasion various international and Italian artists have been called upon to give their interpretations of the Serpenti emblem: Davide Quayola, Sougwen Chung, Daniel Rozin, Cate M, Fabrizio “Bixio” Braghieri, and Filippo Salerni illustrate the eclectic nature of the icon. You will be able to reserve your visit to the exhibition through the below link or the QR code shown on the advertising around the city and on certain tram lines. All guided tours will be held by trained students from the Università Cattolica in Milan.

Where: Dazio di Levante di Piazza Sempione
When: From 11 October to 19 November 2023