Milan, a site-specific installation by Chiara Dynys will bring the sea to Palazzo Citterio

From May 8 to September 7, 2025 Palazzo Citterio in Milan will host Once Again, the new monographic project by Chiara Dynys, curated by Anna Bernardini.

The installation, conceived specifically for the underground room known as Stirling, is in continuity with the artist’s long research, which for more than 30 years has been exploring the dialogue between real and imaginary space, immersing visitors in a suspended and alienating atmosphere.

Once Again, whose title is inspired by Nietzsche’s theory of the Eternal Return, captures the essence of Dynys’ creative journey, as well as his aesthetics and language, continually suspended between reality and dream.

The central work is an enormous “moving machine,” designed by Dynys to inhabit the Stirling space: three rotating perspective rollers spanning ten meters wide and twelve meters long, simulating the incessant movement of waves crashing on the shore. This scenic device is inspired by the extraordinary theatrical machines of the seventeenth century, capable of arousing wonder and amazement through the power of illusion. The environment will engage the audience in an immersive experience, ideally transporting them to a beach, where fragments, words and phrases related to Chiara Dynys’ poetics land, but at the same time capable of reflecting personal emotions and memories of each visitor. This work fully reflects the distinctive features of the artist’s practice: mastery in the use of multiple materials and a predilection for craft processes typical of past eras but also of our contemporary times.

The composition develops on cool chromatic tones, and the wave-like movement of water, accompanied by a hypnotic mechanical sound, evokes both the artificial nature of the work and the symbolic power of the sea, a universal element of the collective imagination.

Suspended in the upper hall, a 360-degree rotating light track transforms Stirling’s supporting column into a symbolic lighthouse, amplifying the evocative dimension of the entire installation.

The path to Once Again will be introduced by a new work entitled Blue Gate: a luminous sea gate made of silver-white handmade glass, a kind of metaphor “of passage” and evocative of a new beginning. In the center, an iridescent glass diamond concentrates light and diffuses it over the entire opalescent surface of the gate.

“The contrast between the artist’s feeling and the language used to evoke it establishes the mental short-circuit that triggers a strong and disruptive process,” writes curator Anna Bernardini, “where once again theater, technology, filmic imagery, nature, light and space resonate and merge in her artistic vocabulary, building forms and movement even in the perceptual deceptions of reality.”

“After the exhibition dedicated to Mario Ceroli,” comments Angelo Crespi, director general of the Pinacoteca di Brera, “we continue our commitment to contemporary art, presenting the work of Chiara Dynys, one of the best-known artists of her generation, whose close relationship with Milan now finds definitive fulfillment. We believe that Brera must once again become the engine of contemporary Italian art, as it was in the early nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and the postwar period.”

A catalog will be published by Allemandi to document the project, produced in collaboration with the Chiara Dynys Archive: the volume will collect critical essays by Anna Bernardini, Angelo Crespi, Alessandro Castiglioni, and Giorgio Verzotti, tracing the artistic path and poetics that inspired the intervention at Palazzo Citterio.

Milan, a site-specific installation by Chiara Dynys will bring the sea to Palazzo Citterio

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