On September 20, 2025, L’aurora viene (The Dawn Comes), the exhibition inaugurating the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery’s new Milan branch inside Palazzo Belgioioso in the heart of Milan, opens to the public. The protagonists are Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana, two giants of twentieth-century and contemporary art, brought together in a confrontation that crosses space, matter and spirituality.
The exhibition takes its title from a 2015 work by Baselitz and is curated with the support of the German artist’s studio and the Lucio Fontana Foundation, which has granted major loans for the occasion. Aurora comes represents more than just an exhibition: it is an intellectual and formal dialogue between two languages that explore the unknown, the origin and end of form.
Georg Baselitz, who has a studio in Italy, recognizes in Fontana an essential reference in his own artistic path, not as a model to follow, but as an interlocutor to reflect on the material, space and meaning of the work. “Interpretation is not useful to any artist,” Baselitz says. “Now, at my age, it’s more about intellectual confrontation rather than dependence.”
In the exhibition, his works of the past decade-including a monumental bronze sculpture and a series of recent portraits-explicitly recall Fontana’s cuts and his investigation of the “beyond” of the pictorial surface. In his paintings, figures seem to emerge from depth, evoking the same impulse toward the infinite that animated Fontana’s Spatialist work.
Lucio Fontana’s works on display include Baroque sculptures from 1937 and a significant selection of Spatial Concepts from the 1950s and 1960s, including the famous Attese, Inchiostri and Gessi. Standing out in particular is The End of God (1963-64), with its oval shape symbolizing both principle and absolute. “The infinite, the inconceivable, the end of figuration, the beginning of nothingness,” Fontana said.
In these works, the radical gesture of cutting and the use of organic forms are not only visual expressions, but philosophical acts, which in confrontation with the disarming corporeity of the bodies represented by Baselitz find a new intensity.
By juxtaposing the works of the two artists, L’aurora viene highlights a shared tension toward mystery, dark matter, and the human condition. The exhibition thus becomes a reflection on the boundary between art and transcendence, between body and universe, as Baselitz emphasizes by evoking Courbet’s L’origine du monde: “[...] like a vision of heaven, of eternity.”
Accompanying the exhibition will be a catalog with critical texts by Flavia Frigeri, Curatorial and Collections Director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and Luca Massimo Barbero, a member of the Artistic Commission of the Lucio Fontana Foundation and one of the most authoritative scholars of the Italian-Argentine artist.
The exhibition L’aurora viene will be followed, in November 2025, by a second major bipersonal exhibition, dedicated to two great women artists, again in the spaces of Palazzo Belgioioso, testifying to Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery’s commitment to bringing an exhibition program of international scope to Milan.
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| Large Thaddaeus Ropac gallery opens in Milan with Fontana and Baselitz |
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