In Milan, a double solo exhibition dedicated to Mirella Bentivoglio and Betty Danon

In Milan, Osart Gallery and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro present Cancellare per vedere, a double solo exhibition dedicated to Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922 - Rome, 2017) and Betty Danon (Istanbul, 1927 - Milan 2002), which opens on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 6 p.m. in the Osart Gallery spaces at Corso Plebisciti 12 and will be open from March 26 to June 27, 2026.

The exhibition brings together a selection of works from 1976, the year of their meeting, and takes its title from a text by Bentivoglio dedicated to La Memoria del segno sonoro, a work presented by Danon in the celebrated exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio. The relationship between the two artists was mainly of a theoretical and intellectual nature: Bentivoglio was among the first to recognize the value of Danon’s research, although their confrontation developed from the beginning in a complex and sometimes conflicting way. The relevance of that encounter also emerges from one of Danon’s writings, The Case of Cases, a fundamental text for understanding her path, in which 1976 is remembered exclusively for the meeting with Bentivoglio, a clear sign of its importance; both, in fact, were artists of international scope, deeply rooted in the present but at the same time oriented toward future developments of artistic language.

Bentivoglio ’s figure stands out not only as an artist, but also as a curator and art critic: starting from verse poetry practiced since her youth, she gradually approached more experimental territories, such as concrete and visual poetry, developing a research centered on the relationship between language and image, matter, object and environment. Her works range from minimal and essential interventions to works of great impact, but they always maintain a reflection on language; among the recurring symbols emerge the egg, the tree and above all the stone book, the centerpiece of this exhibition, in which the book loses its communicative function to become a visual and contemplative object, charged with semiological meanings.

Different but complementary is the path of Danon, a reserved artist who in the 1980s chose to move away from traditional circuits to devote himself to Mail Art, continuing to develop an intimate and silent research. Her sign also stems from references to Jungian symbology, which identifies primary forms in the circle and the square; over time, however, these figures are reduced to the essential, allowing the dot and the line to emerge as primary elements, endowed with an almost cosmological significance and declined in multiple formal variations.

Although starting from different sensibilities, both artists share the overcoming of the purely utilitarian function of language: Bentivoglio tends to “solidify” thought in the weight of stone and object, while Danon “distills” it to its essence, to the purity of point and line. In this sense, their researches appear complementary and convergent, showing how language can be born at the very moment when the word dissolves.

In Milan, a double solo exhibition dedicated to Mirella Bentivoglio and Betty Danon

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