From Sept. 16 to Dec. 14, 2025, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan is hosting Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin, a solo exhibition by Sara Enrico (Biella, 1979) curated by Bruna Roccasalva, promoted by Fondazione Furla and GAM. The exhibition represents the seventh appointment of the Furla Series program, an initiative that since 2017 has seen Fondazione Furla collaborate with Italian institutions to promote the work of women artists in contemporary culture.
Enrico’s project stands out for its site-specific nature: for the first time since the collaboration between Fondazione Furla and GAM was established, the artistic intervention is developed exclusively in the open spaces of the Villa Reale garden. The installation opens up new possibilities for the relationship between contemporary art, natural landscape and public space, transforming the park into an environment of observation and interaction with the works. The Italian artist focuses her research on surface, corporeity and materiality, elements investigated through sculpture. Her multidisciplinary approach integrates techniques of tailoring, choreography and architecture, combining materials such as concrete, fabric and steel with digital tools to explore transformative processes capable of articulating a fluid relationship between body, dress and space.
The works on display stem from a reflection on the garden as a place where nature is modulated according to aesthetic, philosophical and social canons, integrating natural elements and cultural superstructures. From this tension between natural and artificial, a landscape within the landscape takes shape: Enrico’s sculptures dialogue with their surroundings without blending in, creating an unstable balance between works, context and viewer. Five interventions, located along a path that runs entirely through the garden, follow architectural lines, solids and voids, verticality and horizontality, natural and built rhythm.
Among the best-known works, The Jumpsuit Theme series (2023-2025) unfolds on the terrace of the Villa and in the Temple of Love. The sculptures derive from the “T” jumpsuit invented by futurist Thayaht in 1919 and are made by pouring cement and pigment into a soft formwork of technical fabric with zippered closures. The lying pose of the figures, vaguely anthropomorphic, emphasizes the horizontal dimension and responds to the vertical sequence of statues on the balustrade, creating a dialogue between horizontality and verticality within the architectural context.
Beyond the Skin (2025), installed on the lawn in front of the Villa, consists of twenty-three elements obtained from nautical foam rubber blocks covered with technical fabric from sportswear. The fabric patterns arise from the manipulation of fragments of painting cloth on the scanner plane, with moving light, and subsequent digital reworking. The combination of artificial colors and natural light play creates an almost psychedelic effect, transforming the work into a horizontal, capsular architecture that interacts with the surrounding landscape.
Continuing along the path, Carriers (2025) focuses on hackberry tree trunks felled by a storm, salvaged and raised by colored iron supports. The intervention reactivates the lost verticality of the trees, suggesting the beginning of a new life cycle. Finally, two Bodiless Observer sculptures (2025) close the path. Made of glass and concrete, they are circular and concave in shape, inviting observation inside and out. The works embody the act of looking, materializing the gaze and simultaneously dematerializing the body, a recurring theme in Enrico’s work.
Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin confirms Sara Enrico’s interest in the dialogue between body, surface and space. The garden of Villa Reale becomes an ideal setting for a work that investigates transformation of matter and ambiguity between body and object, generating a continuous reflection between natural and artificial and defining a landscape that combines reality and imagination.
The project is part of the multi-year partnership between Fondazione Furla and GAM, launched in 2021, with cycles of annual exhibition projects in which contemporary art dialogues with the museum’s spaces and collections. Furla Series thus continues its curatorial line dedicated to women artists, strengthening the visibility of their research in the Italian cultural context. Sara Enrico’s exhibition represents an example of how contemporary art can transform the urban and natural landscape, stimulating reflections on the relationship between works, context and user.
Sara Enrico was born in Biella in 1979 and lives and works in Turin. She completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and specialized in the restoration of ancient paintings at the Spinelli Institute in Florence. Her awards include the New York Prize in 2018, the year she participated in a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. In 2021 he was awarded the Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT Italian Fellowship in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome.
His exhibition career includes numerous Italian and international institutions. Among the most recent are: Castello di Rivoli - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2024-2025); Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto (2024-2025); OGR - Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Turin (2023); 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2022); Národní galerie Praha, Prague (2019); Mart di Trento e Rovereto (2019); OFF Biennale Cairo, Cairo (2018); PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Turin (2017); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014).
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| Sara Enrico transforms the garden of Villa Reale in Milan with "Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin" |
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