From October 30, 2025, to January 18, 2026, the Stirling Room at Palazzo Citterio in Milan will host Nobu at Elba, a monumental installation by Giovanni Frangi consisting of four huge painted canvases, for a total of forty meters, and twenty burnt foam sculptures, lit at regular 15-minute intervals. The intent is to evoke the same emotion one feels at night beside a waterway immersed in the silence of an uninhabited landscape.
The exhibition entitled Nobu at Elba Redux offers the public an opportunity to see again, 20 years later, a work that was first exhibited in the large stable of Villa Panza in Varese, the place for which the installation was conceived. The Redux in the title emphasizes precisely the return of this work, once again presented under the curatorship of Giovanni Agosti.
For the Milan appointment, the work is rethought through a new installation curated by Francesco Librizzi, who wanted to preserve the original experience of the installation, while strengthening its dialogue with the Stirling Room. This space, characterized by a large cubic volume of exposed concrete, a central pillar and a monumental staircase, imposes a direct confrontation with any artistic intervention placed there. For this reason, a structure was built to accommodate the work and present it as a large stage backdrop.
Completing the itinerary are the 135 diary sheets that document the genesis of Nobu at Elba, returning suggestions, notes and reflections that guided Frangi during the creation of the installation.
“Nobu’s canvases, along with the foam rubber sculptures remained for twenty years in a warehouse of mine,” Giovanni Frangi declares, “rolled up on six four-meter tubes. In a large shed I began to unroll them on the floor like huge carpets, and they began to breathe again with the oil still looking fresh in some areas.” "Remounting Nobu at Elba in the Stirling Room,“ he explains, ”which at this point became Redux, was a feat because with Francesco Librizzi and Giovanni Agosti we evaluated many different possibilities for months. In the end, the choice is the most ’Stirling-esque’: on the one hand out of respect for the brutalism of the space and, on the other, because it is the one that allowed us to reassemble the work as it was conceived to size for the spaces of the Scuderia Grande at Villa Panza in 2004. It is a bet with the passing of time, a way of testing ourselves and seeing the effect it has."
“The myth of springing creation,” added Giovanni Agosti, “is contradicted by the presentation, sheet by sheet, of a kind of diary that presents inspirations, hijackings, digressions and false trails, so as to provide multiple keys to interpreting a work that is so complex and layered, yet at the same time so elementary and immediate.”
Hours: Thursday through Sunday from 2 to 7 p.m.
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| Frangi's installation evoking a river at night is back on display after 20 years. In Milan, at the Stirling Hall |
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