On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Andrea Pazienza’s birth, MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo pays tribute to one of the most original and visionary protagonists of Italian comics and contemporary art with a wide-ranging exhibition project involving both museum venues. The project kicks off at MAXXI in L’Aquila, which from December 6, 2025 to April 6, 2026 will host the exhibition Andrea Pazienza. The Mathematics of the Sign, curated by Giulia Ferracci and Oscar Glioti. This is a twofold celebration that aims to restore the creative energy of an artist central to the Italian comics scene, inviting visitors to enter the heart of his artistic process and retrace his path from his formative years.
In the spaces of MAXXI L’Aquila, works from his early days are presented: about one hundred works created in India ink, watercolor, and marker, some of them large in size and for the most part never shown before. Works that highlight the constant tension between painting and comics, between drawing with an academic imprint and the vitality of a contemporary and popular language. Pazienza explores, investigates and constructs a unique expressive idiom, starting from the sign understood as the original nucleus of visual narrative: a point of contact between impulse and balance, gesture and reflection, a living organism capable of returning emotions, stories and states of mind by transforming them into images.
The title of the exhibition, The Mathematics of the Sign, summarizes his way of understanding art: a system that is only apparently free, but in reality carefully calibrated; a system in which rigor and spontaneity, order and imagination, technique and intuition coexist, the language through which the artist has been able to elevate comics to a new form of art. The exhibition combines chronological trend and thematic nuclei, traversing the author’s entire creative evolution. A special section is dedicated to the lively cultural context of Pescara and, in particular, to the Convergenze Art Workshop, founded and directed by Peppino D’Emilio, a place of research and dialogue active from 1973 to 1981.
In Rome, the project will arrive in spring 2026.
Pictured: Andrea Pazienza, Italian Republic (1974; acrylic on canvas, 50x70 cm). © Mariella Pazienza and Michele Pazienza
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| MAXXI celebrates Andrea Pazienza on the 70th anniversary of his birth, in L'Aquila and Rome |
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