Exhibition reviews

Why Helen Frankenthaler's painting was "without rules." What the Florence exhibition looks like

The most poetic and coldest painting at the same time on display at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (through Jan. 26) in the exhibition Helen Frankenthaler. Painting Without Rules, is titled Mornings and dates from 1971. The American painter was 43 years...
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Actuality and inactuality of flags. Luca Bertolo and Flavio Favelli in Castelnuovo Magra

A white flag flies listlessly amidst the vines, hoisted on a flagpole guarded from above, from the tower of the Castle of the Bishops of Luni that gazes down on the village of Castelnuovo Magra and keeps an eye on those who flutter down on the plain ...
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Picasso was also a migrant. What the Milan exhibition looks like

The story of the Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is among the founding masterpieces of twentieth-century art, can be taken as a very eloquent example of the damage that, in the field of the arts, can be caused by the most boorish, most obtuse, most reac...
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Andrea Baboni celebrated in Correggio with a valuable and fascinating exhibition

Curated by Francesca Manzini and Francesca Baboni, the city of Correggio honors with an exhibition(Viaggio tra Otto e Novecento. The Andrea Baboni Collection: a creative journey between painting and collecting) its illustrious son Andrea Baboni, born...
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The skin of the chameleon and Bertozzi & Casoni's memento mori

New technologies, including those of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence that seeks to simulate dialogue capabilities with a human interlocutor by giving the impression of exercising, precisely, a critical factor that makes the conversation credible...
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Like a trip to the French Midi: what the Matisse exhibition in Mestre is like.

Constructed like a journey is the fine exhibition that the MUVE-Candiani Cultural Center has dedicated to Henri Matisse, a journey to that "Midi" in which, as art historian André Chastel guessed, "French modern art" was born, which in that par...
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A Little Tour on the Grand Tour. What the exhibition at the Lia Museum in La Spezia is like.

Collecting ancient art also follows trends. Those who look at this world from the outside may find it hard to believe, but it is so, it has always been so, and there is no reason to believe that it will cease to be so. And although it often happens t...
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Is Ai Weiwei still a current artist? What the exhibition at Palazzo Fava in Bologna is like.

Ai Weiwei's exhibition is spread over the two floors of Palazzo Fava in Bologna. On the second floor is a varied selection of works by the Chinese artist: from the action of breaking an ancient Ming vase to another Ming vase with the Coca Cola logo p...
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Unlikely eulogy of Botero: that is, of the Botero we would like to see

The years in which Fernando Botero appeared in the art world, that is, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were for Colombia marked by a social climate where violence was the order of the day (as, for that matter, is the case today with the domination...
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The walk in the sky. Correggio's prodigy in Parma in Lucio Rossi's photos.

Yes, to Correggio some of those pious monks of the Abbey of San Giovanni in Parma, in 1519, might well have advised him to depict an Ascension up there, in that white dome just finished "more romano": so much so that the still young painter, just out...
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Canova in Lucca: an exhibition on Lucca's neoclassicism... in disguise

Vittorio Sgarbi has not changed one iota the formula of the "exhibition in disguise" (so we could call it, taking up a definition that, moreover, is his), proposed for the second year in a row to the public of Lucca. Last year with an exhibition, suc...
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Note on Pino Pascali at the Prada Foundation

One of the most beautiful photographs of Pino Pascali was taken by Andrea Taverna in the artist's Roman studio in 1968: it depicts him as a rural shaman, dressed in raffia costumes and other objects. In fact, however, at its highest points, that shoo...
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Notes on Valerio Adami. In the margins of the exhibition on the Royal Palace in Milan

"To draw well," Valerio Adami asserted, "one needs broad gestures, I would say the style of a tennis player... ". On several occasions during his long career, he in fact argued for the primacy of drawing in his creative research: it is here - as atte...
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A Renaissance ... cadaverous! What the Renaissance exhibition at the Museion in Bolzano looks like.

The Reinassance exhibition at the Museion in Bolzano presents fifteen artists under 35 working in northern Italy. The occasion for the exhibition is a grant of 60,000 Swiss francs, which the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation awards each year in collab...
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The history of theaters (and their wonders): what the photo exhibition in Palermo looks like

"In Sicily we can't make it, because Sicily is a difficult land." In an off-the-cuff statement by Antonio Calbi, curator of Patrizia Mussa's photographic exhibition Teatralità - Architectures for Wonder, at Villa Zito in Palermo (through Sept....
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Federico Barocci, the smile of melancholy

As Andrea Emiliani wrote in 1975, signing the catalog of the exhibition that is still considered a landmark in the critical relocation of Federico Barocci, an artist who never achieved the status of the revolutionary who conditions an era and redefin...
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