The must-see exhibitions and events in January

Parma: “Keith Haring - Radiant Vision”

Over 130 works by the most famous pop artist of the 1980s, from a private collection, including lithographs, serigraphs, drawings on paper and posters. The works illustrate the entire span of Haring’s short but prolific career, examining different aspects of the artist’s life and output, including subway drawings and Street Art, exhibitions in some of New York’s most famous galleries, the Pop Shop, and his commercial work.  The exhibition project aims to be a tribute to the artist, a passionate supporter of social justice, who has always dedicated himself to young people from all over the world, supporting their health and their rights and at the same time their creative development. During his short career, Keith Haring (1958-1990) rewrote the rules of contemporary art, integrating the seemingly discreet arenas of downtown New York’s gritty counterculture and those of the uptown artistic aristocracy. Haring’s style is unmistakable in every aspect of his production: paintings, prints, posters, drawings, sculptures and Street Art. He made himself known through his art, fighting in defence of civil rights and against discrimination. Despite the deep meaning of his works, many lack an explanation and above all are nameless, in order to grant the public an active role in the creation of the work, in step with the artist himself.

Where: Palazzo Tarasconi
When: Until 4 February 2024

© William Fernando Aparici

Milano: “Visibile/Invisibile. Tecniche della Meraviglia”

Curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti and produced by Casa degli Artisti and Associazione Atelier Spazio Xpò, the exhibition features the six young artists Florentin Aisslinger (for the Nuovo Grand Tour), Lan Gao, Olmo Gasperini, Marco Paganini, Dario Pruonto and Alessia Rosato and the three international tutor artists Cesare Fullone, Giuliana Cuneaz and Antonio Marras, who took part in the residency that began in September in the Casa degli Artisti ateliers. The theme of the exhibition stems from the need to show works that reflect on the most innovative and discussed artistic and social themes of recent decades, that of invisibility. We are talking about social and existential issues, issues that concern the human being as much as the environment, which take on the characteristics of an all-encompassing vision, such that one becomes practically invisible. This is what it takes to focus on wonder, but not a cultured or sophisticated wonder, not the kind we know from fairy tales that leads us to believe things that are unimaginable, but a naive, enchanted wonder, the wonder of simple things, like the stars and the sea, that never tires. The works on display arise from a natural desire to be enchanted by what surrounds us through the "attempt to give form to the invisible". 

Where: Casa degli Artisti
When: Until 21 January 2024

Milano: “Filippo Panseca - Forme a futura memoria”

The exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and Valentino Catricalà, reinterprets the complex work of the well-known Sicilian artist. Between art, design and set design, the exhibition retraces the work of Filippo Panseca: from the first kinetic works of the 1960s to the 'biodegradable projects' of the 1970s, from technological experiments to design projects and set designs. Born in Palermo in 1940, the leading artist of the 1960s and 1970s was one of the pioneers of digital art in Italy, of environmental issues, of reflections on the new information society. Among the works on display are spheres, paintings, kinetic works and, specifically, SWART Art or Mat, the vending machine for digital works of art and the story of the winged, ephemeral and biodegradable Victory of Napoleon statue by Canova, displayed in the courtyard of the Brera Academy. Through previously unpublished documents, his great exhibition activity is highlighted, which saw him participate in the Venice Biennials, two Milan Triennials, the Rome Quadrennial and exhibitions at galleries such as Il Naviglio, Apollinaire and L'Obelisco.

Where: ADI Design Museum
When: Until 21 January 2024

© Carlo Favero

Bologna: “Luisa Aiani e Ico Parisi - Positano”

The exhibition project at Palazzo Bentivoglio curated by Davide Trabucco presents an entire room designed by Luisa Aiani and Ico Parisi: the Positano room, designed by the couple for the Roman company MIM - Mobili Italiani Moderni in 1958, a company that represents an exception within design, being one of the few non-Lombard brands to impose itself in the international panorama of furniture production. Passers-by in Via del Borgo di San Pietro 3A can admire this work signed by an unjustly forgotten couple in the history of design of the second half of the 20th century until 20 January 2024 in the shop window on the street. The room is part of a series of furniture by MIM dedicated to Italian holiday resorts, of which, in addition to Positano, the Rio and Limonta tables and the Lerici bookcase are also part, again designed by Aiani and Parisi. The curator's desire to attribute the paternity of the work to Luisa Aiani as well, called by her surname and not by her acquired one, is part of the long critical path that has seen over the years the recognition of female figures, of important life and professional associations, with the role not only of assistants, but of real co-participants. 

Where: garage BENTIVOGLIO
When: Until 20 January 2024

Milano: “Richard Zinon - IX”

First solo exhibition of the British painter Richard Zinon in the Milanese spaces of Cadogan Gallery, that presents a new series of large-scale works with broad, strongly gestural brushstrokes, with which the artist reflects on the very act of painting. Halfway between Jackson Pollock’s action painting and sumi-e oriental calligraphic compositions, Zinon’s is a profoundly dynamic and energetic art, in which powerful marks find space on layers of warm-toned backgrounds, inviting the observer's gaze to participate in a continuous play between solidity and airiness. The artist’s strokes are intended to appeal to the intimate energy of each of us, with a technique honed over the years that generates the perfect circumstances for the brushstrokes to strike the canvas in a gentle, powerful and harmonious manner. The title of the exhibition refers to the esoteric branch of numerology according to which this number is particularly powerful. In this way, the exhibition becomes the emblem of an opening towards the unknown, towards a future that one is not yet able to see clearly, but which is present, and is coming.

Where: Cadogan Gallery
When: Until 15 February 2024

Courtesy l'artista / the artist e /and Fondazione ICA Milano, ph. © Dario Lasagni

Milano: “Michael Stipe - I have lost and I have been lost but for now I'm flying high”

A major solo exhibition by multifaceted visual artist and iconic leader of the band R.E.M., Michael Stipe. The project, specially conceived for Fondazione ICA Milano, is curated by the institution's director Alberto Salvadori. The exhibition focuses, in part, on portraiture, interpreted through a wide range of forms—from photography to, ceramics, sculpture and audio works. A selection of more than 120 both newly created and previously unseen works will be on view throughout the ICA’s spaces, reflecting the full scope of Michael Stipe's artistic production. The installation interweaves concepts of homage and vulnerability, as concerns embedded in Stipe’s both figurative and non-figurative representation of the human form. The title of the exhibition emerged from a conversation between curator and artist, in which Stipe identifies vulnerability as a driving force, radically challenging conventional considerations of this feeling state as one of liability or weakness. Within the accelerating chaos of contemporary life, Stipe identifies vulnerability as a powerful tool for survival and a broader philosophical approach to charting new paths forward.

Where: Fondazione ICA Milano
When: Until 16 March 2024

Brescia: “Roberto Juarez - 80's East Village Large Works on Paper + Downtown amigos y amigas”

First solo exhibition in Italy of the artist Roberto Juarez with the group composed by Stephen Barker, Arch Connelly, Donna Francis, Jeff Perrone, Elaine Reichek, mark Tambella and Jimmy Wright. The exhibition is curated by Fabio Cherstich and investigates the New York art scene in the 1980s with this new exhibition project. The stage is Manhattan with a focus on the East Village, in a choral dialogue prompted by a valuable body of large works on paper by Roberto Juarez. Made between 1981 and 1985 and rediscovered by the artist in his Columbia County, New York studio during the lockdown, after 40 years, they continue to emanate the city's impetuous energy at its creative peak. Arriving in New York in the winter of 1980, young Roberto Juarez immediately established himself in the downtown art scene, combining neo- expressionism with imagery influenced by his queer identity. The artist's half-Mexican and half-Puerto Rican roots play a key role in his choice of subjects and colours, adding an extra layer of meaning to his work. Serving as a prologue to this focus on Roberto's works on paper comes the second exhibition, "Amigos y Amigas". The group show celebrates the artists who, united by friendship and together with Juarez, contributed to the vibrant East Village art and cultural scene. 

Where: APALAZZOGALLERY
When: Until 3 February 2024

© Fabio Mantegna

Milano: “Motherboy”

Group exhibition born out of the dialogue between curator Stella Bottai and artist Gray Wielebinski around the so-called “mammone” (mummy’s boy) – a notion that their own embodied experiences – as mother and son respectively – celebrate, critique, and reconfigure. The exhibition draws on queer, feminist, and psychoanalytic understandings of the highly charged and symbolically rich relationality between mothers and sons to attend to themes of sacrifice, co-dependency, desire, identity, denial, hierarchies, possessiveness, and betrayal. Motherboy takes up the strange convergence of power encoded in the mother’s boy – the undervalued, often invisibilized labor of the mother versus the overindulged, privileged lot of the “Mama’s boy" – treating this as a starting point of broader political critique. The show features new and recent works selected in close dialogue with the participating artists (Sophia Al Maria; Jonathan Lyndon Chase; Patrizio Di Massimo; Bracha L. Ettinger; Hadi Falapishi; Jes Fan; Apostolos Georgiou; Allison Katz; Leigh Ledare; Maia Ruth Lee; Gaetano Pesce; Jenna Sutela; Gray Wielebinski; Kandis Williams; Bruno Zhu). Spanning painting, collage, sculpture, video and installation, these pieces articulate different atmospheres across three floors of the gallery. Bodily postures form a motif across the show, contemplating the significance of certain actions – such as standing, posing, sleeping, hitting, or embracing – in connection to interpersonal hierarchies and emotional language.

Where: Gió Marconi
When: Until 17 February 2024

Verona: “Robert Doisneau”

The evocative setting of the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona hosts a major retrospective on Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) that recounts over fifty years of the career of one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, considered one of the fathers of French humanist photography and street photojournalism. Doisneau's lens takes the visitor on an exciting stroll through the streets of the centre and the banlieue of Paris, along the Seine, in bistros and art galleries, immortalising with his unique gaze the women, men, children and lovers of Paris, as well as his artist friends, writers and poets. Among the masterpieces on display is Le baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville from 1950, which depicts a young couple kissing in front of Paris City Hall while people walk by quickly and distractedly. An iconic photo, accompanied by more than one hundred and thirty other shots that are at once light and profound, ironic and moving.

Where: Palazzo della Gran Guardia
When: Until 14 February 2024

Milano: “Mario de Biasi - Vita d’artista”

On the centenary of his birth, the exhibition highlights the great artistic calibre of the Bellunese photographer, a calibre to which his importance as a photojournalist is clearly linked, since only someone with such a natural talent for composition and constructive geometries as he had can succeed in depicting historical events with such realism and sharp clarity. On display are images from the repertoire of nature photographs, which De Biasi was so passionate about and which bear genuine witness to his high talent for composition, together with reportage shots in which the aesthetic, stylistic and constructive element clearly plays a primary role. Extraordinary works, such as the geometries on the cathedral square with snow (1951) or a sublime Brigitte Bardot from 1958, or the little gem of footprints in the snow from '64, so dear to Bruno Munari, or a shot from the first reportage of 1953 on the floods in Holland in which one seems to see the characters of Bruegel the Elder. These images, and those on nature, are articulated without thematic distinction in a single continuous display, highlighting a style that makes the two a coherent manifestation of the same great personality. All 34 works presented are in a vintage edition. Not exhibited but visible upon request is a beautiful vintage print of the 1954 shot Gli Italiani si voltano.

Where: Galleria 70
When: Until 9 March 2024

© Ugo Carmeni

Padova: “Esther Stocker - Uno scenario mentale”

A personal exhibition by Esther Stocker (Silandro - BZ, 1974), curated by Riccardo Caldura, whose works - as is the approach of the Padua institution - are placed in dialogue with some works, not yet exhibited, that are part of the institution's collection, collected in a focus entitled ORDITI DELLA RAZIONALITÀ curated by Caldura himself. UNO SCENARIO MENTALE presents in the nave of the former church a series of recently produced canvases and sculptures, some conceived and created for this occasion, by the South Tyrolean artist who now lives and works in Austria, works that contain all the elements that characterise her work but taken to the extreme. Marked by an accurate study of primitive formal relationships, geometric grids, and spatial measurement, the works exhibited on this occasion seem to enact a veritable structural collapse, a deconstruction and pulverisation of geometric rules.

Where: Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo
When: Until 3 March 2024

Reggio Emilia: “Marionette e Avanguardia: Picasso, Depero, Klee, Sarzi”

The exhibition, followed by James Bradburne, revolves around the concept of the ‘fourth wall’, i.e. the capacity for emotional involvement that makes a successful performance a reality capable of immersing the spectator in the story being staged. When a marionette or puppet breaks the fourth wall, it conquers the trust of the audience, giving the show the power to blur that division between stage and world, between art and life. This was well understood by those artists – protagonists of the world of Art and Puppet Theatre, such as Pablo Picasso, Otello Sarzi, Enrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, Paul Klee  – who, rather than dismissing marionettes and puppets as mere children’s games, took their enthusiasm seriously and indeed looked to ‘creative play’ as a source of aesthetic inspiration from which to seek new forms of visual expression. While some artists saw the potential of puppets and marionettes to imagine a better world, satirists used transgressive and biting performances to attack the political establishment. Targeting adult audiences and drawing on a solid tradition of political satire from ‘puppet theatre’, hand-held puppets in particular were also used to critique political and social conditions. Two stages (a shack and a castelet), set up in the rooms on the ground floor, will allow all visitors to try their own hand at puppet theatre. Thanks to collaboration with the Compagnia Carlo Colla of Milan and the Associazione 5T of Reggio Emilia, a rich programme of mini-shows/performances, interpreted by puppet theatre professionals, will bring the weekends to life for the entire duration of the exhibition. Seeing them at work, we might wonder: “Do puppets go to heaven when they die?” – an entirely natural question, for puppets occupy a grey area, midway between living creatures and inanimate objects.

Where: Palazzo Magnani
When: Until17 March 2024

© Carlotta Coppo

Milano: “Rodin e la danza”

The exhibition at MUDEC is made possible thanks to the collaboration with Musée Rodin in Paris, from which are coming 53 pieces. It describes the fascination and strong creative imprinting that dance had on the artistic genius of Auguste Rodin. A virtuous circle where dance was an inspirational muse for the artist in the early 20th century, and where in turn contemporary dance still finds inspiration from the artist through his ‘dancing’ works, which are unique and so topical. Thanks to the valuable collaboration with Musée Rodin, Mudec is exhibiting for the first time in Italy a series of fifteen statuettes of dancers dedicated by the French artist to ‘Dance Movements’. As a matter of fact, fourteen of them are coming from the Parisian Museum, and on this occasion the group will be joined by a fifteenth statuette, which is preserved in Rome at GNAM, the Italian National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition also becomes an opportunity to take an extraordinary journey into the world of dance through a video selection referring to contemporary choreography and choreographers, who were inspired by Rodin for their performances. The continuous dialogue between Rodin’s sculptures and the multimedia and digital system, together with the immersive installation – conceived and realized by the design studio Dotdotdot – create a constant play of visual and symbolic cross-references. The three sections of the exhibition are the result of a complex and painstaking work, and are curated respectively by Aude Chevalier, Assistant Curator of the sculpture department at Musée Rodin, Cristiana Natali, Professor of South Asian Anthropology, Anthropology of Dance and Ethnographic Research Methodologies at the University of Bologna, and Elena Cervellati, Associate Professor of History of Dance and Dance Theories and Practices at the Department of Arts of the University of Bologna.

Where: MUDEC
When: Until 10 March 2024

Verona: “Bruno Munari - La leggerezza dell’arte"

An unprecedented exhibition project - curated by Eataly Art House – E.ART.H. - dedicated to Bruno Munari, one of the main protagonists of the 20th century Italian cultural scene, whose artistic and intellectual legacy, 25 years after his death, continues to inspire generations of creative people all over the world. Curated by Alberto Salvadori and Luca Zaffarano, with the collaboration of Repetto Gallery in Lugano, the exhibition will be open to the public free of charge in the Art House spaces on the first floor of Eataly Verona. The exhibition project retraces the fundamental stages of a career devoted to experimentation, which spanned the entire 20th century, leaving a highly varied and innovative body of works. The exhibition provides a clear reading of the creative processes at the basis of Munari's poetics and the spectacular and playful forms with which the artist always addressed an undifferentiated public, thanks to a skilful combination of art, technique and playful spirit. The exhibition also includes a series of educational workshops dedicated to the artist's creative design thinking, summarised in the famous Munari Method, curated by the Bruno Munari Association and designed by Silvana Sperati, structured by age group and open to schools of all levels and families.

Where: Eataly Art House - E.ART.H.
When: Until 31 March 2024