The must-see exhibitions and events in May

Bolzano: “«I just don’t like eggs!» Andrea Fraser on collectors, collecting, collections”

First solo exhibition ever devoted by an Italian institution to the research of artist, writer and thinker Andrea Fraser (USA, 1965). Curated by Andrea Viliani with Vittoria Pavesi, the exhibition is the first survey solely dedicated to Fraser’s works investigating collectors, collecting, the art market, and the intersections between private and public collections. The project includes works spanning the artist’s overall research, from the late 80s to her recent productions, including a new artwork especially conceived for this exhibition. Taken from the script of Fraser’s performance May I Help You?, the title «I just don’t like eggs!» evokes the language and mentality of collecting as an enactment of taste, desire, distinction, possession, categorization, negation, exclusivity, and the exercise of choice as an expression of power. 

Where: Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare
When: Until 22 February 2025

Milano: “On ne fait pas ça”

Solo exhibition by Swiss artist John Armleder. The exhibition brings together works from various strands of Armleder’s lifelong practice. His relentless fascination and savvy juxtaposition of “high” and “low” art, decoration and kitsch, as well as geometry and abstraction, place Armleder's work on the cusp of humour and reverence. Armleder challenges conventions of art, its formulation, and presentation. Influenced by the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and associated with the Geneva-based Groupe Ecart, Armleder draws inspiration from the ethos of American composer and artist John Cage. On ne fait pas ça presents a retrospective of his work spanning 1994 to 2023, encompassing Armleder’s iconic furniture sculptures to his latest pour and puddle paintings.

Where: Massimo de Carlo
When: Until 11 May 2024

© Luca_Guadagnini

Bolzano: “RENAISSANCE”

Highly anticipated exhibition devoted to the celebration of young contemporary artists from South Tyrol and Milan. RENAISSANCE highlights transdisciplinary artistic positions who share a commitment to a regenerative and critical examination of their cultural heritage. On the occasion of one of the highest grants for young art in Europe, awarded by the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation, Museion presents an exhibition featuring selected works by 15 young artists from northern Italy. Despite the diversity of their practices – including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, video, photography, and performance – all artists share a regenerative approach towards remnants from the past. How does a young generation of artists process their weighty cultural heritage, shaped by aesthetic and social “standards”, values, role models, icons, or expectations of the artist figure? How do they build upon ruins of the past which still cast long shadows?

Where: Museion
When: Until 1 September 2024

Milano: “AlexDACORTE - World Leader Pretend”

World Leader Pretend is an exhibition of new painting, sculpture and installation by Venezuelan-American artist Alex Da Corte. It is Da Corte's first exhibition in Milan since Devil Town at Gió Marconi in 2015, and his first exhibition in Italy since the 2019 Biennale di Venezia. The artist has been the subject of recent survey exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa Japan. Da Corte was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Where: Gio Marconi
When: Until 20 July 2024

© Guido Brualdi

Cattolica: “IL GIOVANE PAZ! Andrea Pazienza da Pescara e oltre”

The exhibition, organised by the Cultural Services of the City of Cattolica, opens the Regina Fumetti Festival 2024. The CLAP Museum (Comics Lab Art Pescara) is the Pescara exhibition centre opened in 2022 and entirely dedicated to comics. The structure, an original contemporary architecture, was purchased and upgraded by Fondazione Pescarabruzzo, under the leadership of President Nicola Mattoscio, with the aim of hosting numerous exhibitions and activities related to the world of the ninth art. Arranged on four levels, it offers one of the largest Italian collections on the genius of comics: Andrea Pazienza. The exhibition is a small tribute to one of the artists currently considered among the most innovative and representative in the field of Italian comics, but once opposed because of the irreverent and satirical charge of his work. It collects some of the works from his formative years, very important in tracing his short artistic path, tragically interrupted in 1988.

Where: Galleria Comunale Santa Croce di Cattolica
When: Until 2 June 2024

© Carlo Favero

Bologna: “Luigi Ghirri. Atelier Morandi”

On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Giorgio Morandi's death, Palazzo Bentivoglio opens its basement spaces to the public, presenting a small and precious exhibition - in collaboration with the Heirs of Luigi Ghirri - dedicated to the shots taken between 1989 and 1990 in Via Fondazza by Maestro Luigi Ghirri in Giorgio Morandi's studio.  The selection of photographs on display, from Palazzo Bentivoglio's private collection and the artist's archive, enriches the story told through images in the book dedicated to Atelier Morandi with a series of prints that were not published in the work of the same name. It is a sentimental itinerary within an evocation of the studio as it appeared before the flat was turned into a museum by Iosa Ghini Associati. The exhibition allows us to delve into an imagery that is less well-known even to the large and numerous public of fans of Morandi's work through an intimate and strongly evocative perspective of the painter's interior and daily landscape, thanks to the harmony that Ghirri's gaze manages to intercept and restore.

Where: Sotterranei di Palazzo Bentivoglio
When: Until 30 June 2024

Bologna: “Vertigo – Video Scenarios of Rapid Changes”

Curated by Urs Stahel, the exhibition presents 29 international artists tackling the theme of our changing society through the artistic medium of video art. Until June 30th, the MAST galleries will house 34 video art installations that analyse, comment on, explore and investigate rapid changes in different contexts including work and production processes, trade and traffic, new behaviours, communication, the natural environment, and the social contract. Could there be any better artistic medium than that of the moving image to convey the idea of transformation, transition and, lastly, vertigo that this continuous mutation provokes? The exhibition is organised into six themed sections accompanied by a series of “Interludes“, video installations scattered throughout the exhibition that act as commentaries on contemporary world events, the state of the planet, and our global condition.

Where: MAST.Galleries
When: Until 30 June 2024

Modena: “Zitt! Zitt! Arriva Lupo Alberto. Silver, 50 anni da lupo”

Zitt! Zitt! Arriva Lupo Alberto. Silver, 50 anni da lupo exhibition curated by Francesca Fontana and Lorenzo Respi, celebrating 50 years of the Lupo Alberto comic, which appeared on the pages of the “Corriere dei Ragazzi” magazine for the first time in 1974. Pencilled in the Modena hinterland by a youthful Guido Silvestri, aka Silver (b. 1952 in Carpi near Modena), Lupo Alberto and the whole McKenzie farm quickly won over the hearts of Italians, going on to become one of a handful of long-running comics, with no fewer than 440 issues produced to date and counting. As the curators explain, Lupo Alberto “doesn’t represent the perfect hero: he’s a good, likeable chap, a bit unlucky and often insecure. He’s used to taking it on the chin, literally and metaphorically, but his real strength is that he takes life with a pinch of salt, sometimes throwing all heed to the wind.Furthermore, the plots of his stories are full of references to current affairs, politics, social events and topics. In short, the farm reflects the same issues, concerns and psychological mechanisms as the real world.” The exhibition, produced in collaboration with McK and Lucca Comics & Games, does not claim to cover everything: Lupo Alberto has spawned so many products, it would be impossible. So what it aims to examine is how the comic has evolved from the earliest strips, by looking at some of the stories most loved by the public or most representative of the years when they were made, and taking a closer look at specific themes and subjects.It also sets out to take stock of the various shapes that Alberto has taken on: different types of merchandising, books, picture cards, cartoons and video games. Finally, it illustrates how Lupo Alberto boldly keeps renewing himself thanks to the creativity of the young authors of Tutto un altro Lupo.

Where: Museo della Figurina - Palazzo S. Margherita 
When: Until 25 August 2024

Milano: “La negazione della forma - Arnaldo Pomodoro tra minimalismo e controcultura”

The exhibition La negazione della forma. Arnaldo Pomodoro tra minimalismo e controcultura turns the spotlight on the period 1966-1970, an extremely lively season, during which Pomodoro developed an unprecedented experimentation with forms – influenced by phenomena such as the Minimal Art – giving life to groups of sculptures characterized by an extreme formal synthesis such as the Rotanti, the Forma X  and Onda, the Vuoto pieno, but also to a series of brightly colored graphics, which recall the chromatic ranges favored by the Pop and of Op Art artists. In these same years, Pomodoro is the protagonist of crucial and stimulating experiences, between the United States and Italy. The exhibition –curated by Federico Giani, curator of the Foundation – presents more than forty works by Pomodoro – including sculptures, graphics, multiples, drawings, models and prototypes –, a selection of archive materials, and some works by other artists – colleagues and students from American campuses – with whom the Maestro became friends in those years, such as Harold Paris, Sue Bitney, William T. Wileyand Stephen Laub. La negazione della forma is the second appointment of Open Studio, the cycle of exhibitions set up in the spaces of the Studio of Arnaldo Pomodoro with which the Foundation explores and rediscovers works or moments of the artist's career.

Where: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro 
When: Until19 May 2024

Courtesy of Giorgio Armani

Milano: “Aldo Fallai per Giorgio Armani”

The story, told in the present, of almost thirty years of uninterrupted artistic dialogue between Giorgio Armani and Aldo Fallai, explores the boundaries of a unique collaboration that defined the very essence of an aesthetic that has made its way into the collective imagination. Born in Florence in 1943, Aldo Fallai lives and works in his native city and in Milan. With a diploma from the Istituto d’Arte in Florence, where he later teaches, opening a graphic design studio with photographer Mario Strippini and begins to approach photography himself. In the mid 1970s he meets Giorgio Armani, who is making his debut as a designer at the beginning of the global affirmation of Made in Italy, to which Fallai’s photography contributes significantly. His first assignment from Armani marks the start of a collaboration that continues for almost thirty years. The narrative pathway develops over two floors and brings together approximately two hundred and fifty shots, which either appeared in magazines or were transformed into billboards with huge media impact. The exhibition juxtaposes images produced for different lines: the photo with the tiger cub, taken in Palermo when the troupe took refuge at the Togni circus one rainy day; the career woman, impersonated by Antonia Dell’Atte, looking directly ahead towards a bright future in the middle of the crowd on Via Durini by the Armani office. And then there’s the Venetian Lagoon, evoked in studio, and the statues of the Foro Italico translated into a play of sharp, graphic shadows. The photographs are at once familiar and surprising, taken with inventiveness and intelligence.

Where: Armani Silos 
When: Until 11 August 2024

Roma: “Ronan Bouroullec”

“Vivid impressions, blooming forms, emotions.” Ronan Bouroullec encapsulates his creative journey with these words, illustrating how his work evolves, diverges, and flourishes across various creative realms. Ronan Bouroullec’s exhibition presented by Galerie kreo at rhinoceros gallery in Rome bears witness to this method founded on the simultaneity of his artistic practices, privileging sensory experience, intuition, and leaving room for improvisation. It brings together vases made in 2022 in Tajimi, Japan – the birthplace and center of Mino Yaki ceramics for over a millennium – but also a series of recent relief sculptures, a collection of previously unseen drawings, and design pieces deriving from the research Bouroullec undertook in his collection for the Saint-Michel de Brasparts Chapel in Brittany, never before exhibited. It represents a moment of assembly of these propositions, inscribed in the contiguous fields of design, sculpture, and drawing, where osmosis can occur at their edges, at their limits. The vase as the thinnest boundary between plastic and functional dimensions, the statuses of sculpture and object. The relief as a space for hybridization of drawing and sculpture. The object that articulates the question of form and atmosphere. It reflects a period of life and work: a few months of 2022-2023 during which they are intimately contemporaneous.

Where: rhinoceros gallery
When: Until 8 September 2024

© Francesco Squeglia

Napoli: “InterACTION NAPOLI”

InterACTION NAPOLI is an exhibition project, conceived by the Made in Cloister Foundation and curated by Demetrio Paparoni, which takes place every two years. Thirty international artists of different generations have been called upon to create site-specific canvases, sculptures and installations in the evocative 16th-century cloister, the Foundation's headquarters. The aim is to create a dialogue with the space and actively involve the community of Porta Capuana by exploring, through the artists' vision, the concept of diversity and promoting dialogue and exchange between different cultural and artistic perspectives. The Offsites are the novelty of this second edition: three installations spread throughout the neighbourhood, offering an extended experience beyond the confines of the cloister and inviting the exploration of a historically and culturally rich area.

Where: Fondazione Made in Cloister
When: Until 21 September 2024