Exhibition reviews

Masolino's Year at the Dawn of the Renaissance. What the Empoli exhibition looks like

Carlo Bertelli was convinced that Masolino da Panicale's voice had begun to take on an "already entirely personal" timbre in Empoli's works. The scholar had in mind especially Christ in Pity, the monumental fresco that a then already 40-year-old Tomm...
Read more...

Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Strozzi puts us at the center of his mental universe

For some time now, Florence has been striving to redesign its artistic identity by opening up to the contemporary, not an easy inclusion in a city whose imagination is universally linked to the historical wonders of which it is the repository. Exempl...
Read more...

Ludovica Carbotta: good insights, but still too academic. What the exhibition at MAMbo in Bologna looks like.

The exhibition Very Well, on my own by Ludovica Carbotta (born 1982 in Turin, lives Barcelona) at MAMbo in Bologna addresses the relationship between the artist, her personal biography, and the dimension of the "city-society." The film Monowe, made t...
Read more...

Rethinking Otherness. Liminal, Pierre Huyghe's monumental undertaking in Venice.

Neural networks, artificial intelligence, interspecies collaboration, transdisciplinarity and genetic manipulation are among the most emblematic terms of the most recent contemporary times. Applied to virtually all areas of research and production, t...
Read more...

Between firsts and marketing. What Yayoi Kusama's exhibition in Bergamo looks like.

Yayoi Kusama 's Infinito presente exhibition at the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, which opened on November 17 last year and runs until March 24, is about to end. With a record sell-out six months after its opening and a turnout of more than ninet...
Read more...

The Pre-Raphaelites as never seen before. What the Forli exhibition, the largest ever in Italy, looks like.

It has been almost five years since thelast exhibition in Italy dedicated to the Pre-Raphaelites: in 2019 some eighty works from London's Tate Britain , including masterpieces such as John Everett Millais'sOphelia, John William Waterhouse's Lady of S...
Read more...

Fashion and freedom in Daniele Tamagni's photos of Congolese dandies and Botswana metalheads

Milan Fashion Week recently ended, which behind the firepower of marketing brings with it some controversy but also interesting debates on how much this seemingly ephemeral world is founded on an ancient need for social affirmation. And so, it is wor...
Read more...

Teller and Mueck at the Milan Triennale: two different exhibitions, but one is antidote to the other

Jurgen Teller and Ron Mueck at the Milan Triennale: two exhibitions that I recommend seeing as one, one a continuation of the other. Jurgen Teller (Erlangen, 1964) is a German fashion photographer who reworks fashion photography in a performative and...
Read more...

A Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec finally removed from stereotypes. What the Rovigo exhibition looks like

Ancient is the problem of the correct framing of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his production: the long sequence of exhibitions that have been dedicated to him has looked, often almost exclusively, toward one part of his production, that of advertisi...
Read more...

Leonardo da Vinci in Livorno? A disappointing, modest and unstructured exhibition

Needless to get around it: they have a problem with exhibitions in Livorno . After last year's lousy Banksy show , a laughable parade of twenty-six multiples by the British street artist that replicated a format already seen and revised far and wide ...
Read more...

When puppets are art and avant-garde. Their history on display in Reggio Emilia

In an age dominated by social media, new technologies and the emerging artificial intelligence that is already creating deep debates both on its role and on the necessity or otherwise of human presence in given areas, who knows if the new generations...
Read more...

Andrea del Sarto's forgotten pupil. What the exhibition on Pier Francesco Foschi looks like in Florence

An artist who looked to tradition, always true to himself, the author of devout, compassed and measured paintings while painting exploded around him. For these reasons, as well as for the fact that he was neglected, perhaps deliberately, by Giorgio V...
Read more...

A northern Tuscan: continuing to rediscover Raffaello Gambogi. What the Livorno exhibition looks like

Destroyed by illness and pain, rebellious in attitude, detached from the world and everyday life, an artist of the finest genius defeated by life. On February 8, 1943, Raphael Gambogi took leave of the world: alone, poor, desperate, ravaged by alcoho...
Read more...

Lorenzo Viani, the inconvenient heretic in Italian art history

It seems to be an established practice, that guilty and senseless delay with which we in Italy reacquaint ourselves with the protagonists of artistic events between the 19th and 20th centuries. Whether out of cultural snobbery, spasmodic foreignophil...
Read more...

The modernity of a supposedly inept. Serafino Macchiati on display in Collesalvetti

To get an idea of the way in which Serafino Macchiati understood his relationship with art, one might turn to a letter that, from Paris, the artist from the Marche region sent to Livorno, addressed to Benvenuto Benvenuti, in the aftermath of an exhib...
Read more...

An incredible master of portraiture. What the exhibition on Giovan Battista Moroni in Milan looks like.

Even an acclaimed contemporary artist like David Hockney can perhaps be included in the ranks of Giovanni Battista Moroni's admirers. But even should one deem it excessive to burden him with the label of enthusiast, it is still safe to say that Hockn...
Read more...