From October 29, 2025 to March 1, 2026, MAXXI-the National Museum of XXI Century Arts- in Rome opens its doors to 1+1. Therelational years, the first major retrospective entirely dedicated toRelational Art. The exhibition, housed in Gallery 3 and curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, the theorist of relational art, with the collaboration of associate curator Eleonora Farina, aims to retrace more than 30 years of a phenomenon that has profoundly marked the dynamics of contemporary art.
The exhibition project stems from the need to investigate a crucial shift that occurred since the 1990s, when a new generation of artists decided to shift the center of gravity of artistic practice from the object to the relationship. In this context, the work ceases to be conceived as an autonomous entity and is redefined through its relationship with those who observe or inhabit it, becoming the starting point for new forms of social interaction.
Coining and formalizing the concept of Relational Aesthetics was Bourriaud himself, in 1998, with the publication of a text destined to guide international critical debate. According to his definition, art produces shared scenarios, situations and practices, where aesthetic value is measured in the ability to activate relationships. Artists associated with this current have worked in different modalities and languages, but united by an approach focused on shared experience. Among the best-known names are Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, who has used irony and provocation to unveil social and institutional mechanisms, but also Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe,Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, who has become famous for convivial actions, often linked to the gesture of cooking and sharing food.
The retrospective at MAXXI aims to restore the breadth and variety of these practices, highlighting howRelational Art has helped shift attention away from closed and static forms toward open and changeable processes. The works and projects presented outline a path that not only documents the birth and evolution of the movement, but also aims to actualize its scope, highlighting its influence on more recent generations of artists. The retrospective is thus an opportunity to verify the persistence and relevance of those practices in a profoundly changed cultural context. In an era marked by the digitization of interactions and the spread of new platforms of virtual sociality, the rethinking of collective experiences proposed by relational artists acquires new resonances.
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| MAXXI in Rome hosts the first, major retrospective on Relational Art curated by Nicolas Bourriaud |
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