Exhibition reviews - Finestre sull'Arte

Mythical Turner: landscapes and myth in the English painter's art. What the Venaria exhibition looks like

"Turner should come to Rome [...]. Here his genius would find bread for his teeth." The consideration was expressed by Sir Thomas Lawrence, an English painter who was residing in Italy at the time, and who in a letter of July 1819 confided to Joseph ...
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Italian painting today. A mapping? No, the exhibition at the Triennale looks like a sketchbook

I think the best assessment of the exhibition Pittura italiana oggi, the large group show that brings together the work of 120 painters at the Milan Triennale, is the sense of surprise that Davide Ferri notes in his essay published in the exhibition ...
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Felicitations. Nostalgia, alert: CCCP 40 years later. What the Reggio Emilia exhibition looks like.

The last performance. The final act. The final farewell. On the most unlikely stage. Felicitations. Forty years after the release of Orthodoxy and twenty years after the last reunion, CCCP - Fedeli alla Linea find themselves together again, among the...
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Fabrizio Plessi's sense of ruins. What the Plessi Sposa Brixia exhibition looks like.

It was 1986 and Fabrizio Plessi brought to the Venice Biennale that year one of his most famous installations, Bronx, indebted to a certain extent to the art of Nam June Paik: twenty-six televisions arranged inside an iron structure, with the monitor...
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Following Caravaggio: how his language spread to Sicily. The exhibition in Messina

Severe and Miraculous. Following Caravaggio "with vigorous and dyed manner, " from July 28 to October 14 at MuMe, Regional Museum of Messina, is an exhibition with something of another era. The dry and rigorous set-up concedes nothing to the expectat...
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Blind leading the dead. What the Chapman brothers' exhibition in Pietrasanta looks like.

We live in the palliative society, argues Byung-chul Han. A society that has removed pain from the horizon of one's experiences, a society that tries to hide pain in every way, a society that has elected personal happiness as the supreme good to the ...
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A rich selection of Joaquín Sorolla's masterpieces: what the centennial exhibition in Valencia looks like

The international art scene is reacquainting itself with the painting of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, and Italy, too, has recently rediscovered one of the major protagonists of modern Spanish painting, thanks to the exhibition organized at the P...
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Men who dressed as women in the U.S. of the 1960s: the exhibition on Casa Susanna

Welcome to Casa Susanna. In the photograph, this name is roughly engraved by hand on the trunk of a tree, in orange. But in another it appears on an actual sign. We see the two images in Arles, France, at theEspace Van Gogh exhibition halls, which ca...
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Leandro Erlich's exhibition in Milan: when art is Instagram-friendly

Dating back to 1999 was Leandro Erlich's debut in a U.S. gallery. The Argentine artist, now risen to the heights of international fame, was twenty-three years old at the time and presented himself at the Kent Gallery in New York with an installation,...
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All of Luca Signorelli in just two rooms. What the five-hundredth anniversary exhibition in Cortona looks like

Seventy precise years separate the first modern monographic exhibition on Luca Signorelli, the one held in 1953 first in Cortona and then in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, from the more recent one, namely the one organized this year for the 500th anniv...
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Arrigo Minerbi Sculptor. Between Ferrara and the Italian culture of the early twentieth century.

From Saturday, July 8, the cool noble halls of Ferrara's Castello Estense welcome visitors to the superb exhibition dedicated to Arrigo Minerbi (Ferrara, 1881 - Padua, 1960), a distinguished prince of early 20th-century Italian sculpture and a person...
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Wifredo Lam, a Cuban in Liguria among ceramics and sea wizards. What the Savona exhibition looks like

"Unclassifiable." This is the adjective, simple but extremely eloquent and fitting, that a few years ago Eskil Lam found to describe the art of his father, Wifredo Lam. There is perhaps no definition that better fits this artist so out of the ordinar...
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Landscapes of an Italy to Desire. What the exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale looks like.

Italy is a Desire. Photographs, Landscapes and Visions (1842-2022), on view through Sept. 3 at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, is a meeting of the Alinari Foundation for Photography and with the Museum of Contemporary Photography-Mufoco. I saw it...
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White Carrara, another missed opportunity to talk about marble: review below expectations

Examined by scratching the surface a little, the seventh edition of White Carrara, the festival that has enlivened the start of summers in the historic center of the city of the marbles since 2017, looks a lot like a Monicelli film. It resembles the ...
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Iconographic Particularities in Seventeenth-Century Genoa. The Extraordinary and Everyday Exhibition.

The cramped exhibition spaces of the Palazzo della Meridiana in Genoa are not easy to manage in order to set up an exhibition within them: the risk of piling too many works on the walls due to the curators' fear of creating an incomplete project is j...
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A Neapolitan in Florence. What the Luca Giordano exhibition at Palazzo Medici Riccardi is like.

Florence owes much of its late Baroque facies to a Neapolitan. If there had been no Luca Giordano, who knows what paths the great decoration of the early 18th century in Florence would have taken: perhaps, spectacular frescoes such as Giuseppe Nicola...
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