Milan, here are the 2020 exhibitions: starring Disney, Roberto Longhi, Renaissance sculpture and women artists

The full program of exhibitions for 2020, as well as some previews for exhibitions in 2021, was presented in Milan. It is a very long and varied program, the result of a great deal of relationship work with institutions and lenders, as well as a sign of an increasingly appreciated planning that aims to make Milan one of the world’s leading cultural centers. “The Milanese and tourists visiting Milan,” commented Mayor Giuseppe Sala, "will have a palimpsest of exhibitions and exhibition routes of great artistic value, including next year. The 2020-21 program that we are presenting today speaks, in fact, of a city increasingly able to respond with originality to plural and international cultural interests. The exhibition proposals we are offering the city are rewarded by the public and critics: this year, for example, Leonardo mai visto, which is still in progress, ranks among the most visited exhibitions in all of Italy. And also as part of the celebrations for the fifth centenary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, the Sala delle Asse has been so popular that we have decided to extend its opening until April 2020."

The artistic programming lines of the 2020-21 exhibition calendar are well defined: the first is the one that follows the thread of the Leonardo celebrations and is included in the Milano Leonardo 500 program schedule. The great success of the Leonardo mai visto project (i.e., the reopening to the public of Leonardo da Vinci’s Sala delle Asse, resulting in an exhibition-focus), which has already been visited by more than 250.000 people, has in fact induced the city administration to extend the extraordinary opening of the Sala delle Asse until April 19, 2020, and the Castello Sforzesco to accompany the initiative with two other exhibition projects dedicated to the Da Vinci genius: Leonardo’s Atelier and the Salvator Mundi (from January 24 to April 19) and A Writing in the Mirror. The Secrets of Leonardo’s Left Hand (January to April).

A second line that weaves together all the 2020 programming is the announced cultural schedule dedicated to The Talents of Women: promoted and coordinated by City of Milan|Culture, it will propose a calendar of multidisciplinary initiatives (from visual arts to various forms of live performance, from letters to media, from fashion to science) dedicated to women protagonists in culture and creative thinking. The overall schedule will be presented in January 2020, but already highlighted in the exhibition program (with a specially created logo that will characterize all initiatives) are projects designed to tell the story of the female artistic universe: from the Stories of the street photographed by Letizia Battaglia (Palazzo Reale, December 5, 2019 to January 19, 2020) to the exhibition dedicated to Adriana Bisi Fabbri, a protagonist of the early twentieth century (Museo del Novecento, December 3, 2019 to March 8, 2020); from the anthological exhibition of Grazia Varisco (Palazzo Reale, from July 13 to September 6), to the exhibition dedicated to Marieda Boschi, a Milanese collector but above all a very talented ceramist and sculptor (Casa Boschi-Di Stefano, from September to December); from the exhibition Divine avant-gardes that will tell the evolution of the female figure as a subject and object of representation in Russia from the 15th to the 20th century (Palazzo Reale, from Oct. 26, 2020 to Feb. 7, 2021), to Luisa Menazzi Moretti’s photographic exhibition portraying the faces (and stories) of immigrant women and men in our country (MUDEC Photo, from April 9 to May 3); from Federica Galli’s 100 etchings (Palazzo Morando, April to June), to the group show dedicated to the great women artists of the seventeenth century, the Ladies of Baroque (Palazzo Reale, December 2020 to March 2021), to the monographic exhibition of Luisa Lambri (PAC, June 23 to September 13).

The third line is marked by Milano ArtWeek, the week dedicated to modern and contemporary art that runs from April 14 to 19, 2020, on the occasion of miart, the international modern and contemporary art fair. Like every spring, in fact, Milan organizes a rich program of art projects and contemporary art exhibitions, involving major public institutions and private foundations. In its exhibition venues, the City of Milan offers contemporary art enthusiasts the first, large-scale anthological exhibition dedicated to Carla Accardi after her death (March 27 to August 30) and Franco Guerzoni ’s solo show (Museo del Novecento, April 3 to June 7), the performative universe of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (PAC, March 31 to June 7), the fascination of calligraphy investigated with new languages by six Chinese artists (Palazzo Reale, April 16 to May 24) and Nairy Baghramian ’s solo show(Furla Series #03, April 16 to July 19), the Iranian artist’s first exhibition in a public space, conceived in dialogue with the spaces and collection of the Gallery of Modern Art (GAM). PhotoWeek also draws a similarly defined line in next year’s exhibition programming, with a series of photographic exhibitions, still in progress, set up in different exhibition spaces: Tina Modotti and “her” Mexico will be the protagonists of an exhibition at MUDEC from April 8 to August 30, while at Palazzo Reale the images created by Margaret Bourke-White will be on stage (from March 18 to June 28).

“The exhibition programming that we are presenting today is inscribed in a quadrant of coherence and organicity, where a crucial axis is represented by the adherence of the individual exhibitions to the identity and mission of each individual institute that designs and realizes them,” said Culture Councilor Filippo Del Corno. “Activities that confirm the research and in-depth work of the civic institutes, which is continuous and fundamental for the conservation and enhancement of a heritage that belongs to our city, and the ability to build a fruitful dialogue with institutions, projects and artists from all over the world.”

Moving on, the Archaeological Museum instead offers a lunge into Egyptian culture(Under the Sky of Nut, from March 11 to Dec. 20); the Civic Aquarium realizes in its spaces a photographic exhibition on the great Italian women scientists (from September to October) and three art exhibitions related to the theme of water (by Letizia Fornasieri, from March 18 to April 26, Alessandro Spadari, from November 18, 2020 to January 24, 2021, and Maria Cristina Fioretti, from February 6 to March 8); Palazzo Morando develops its mission as a space dedicated to costume with the Stile Milano exhibition (from January 20 to March 3); the GAM, from June to September, delves into the nineteenth-century story of Emanuel Vidović Croatian artist akin to Italian Symbolist experiences; the Castello Sforzesco creates together with the Louvre a major exhibition on Renaissance sculpture from Donatello to Michelangelo(L’anima e il corpo, from Sept. 25, 2020 to Jan. 13, 2021), the monographic exhibition on photographer Cesare Colombo (from Feb. 21 to June 14) and the MilanoVetro-35 exhibition (from Feb. 19 to April 19), a biennial art glass competition for young people under 35; the Sormani Library reconstructs, thanks to its archives, the relationships between some women writers, journalists and poets of the early twentieth century(The Writing of Women Soul of the Twentieth Century, from October to December) and offers an in-depth study of Milanese sports(At the Origins of Sports in Milan, from March to May); the Boschi Di Stefano House Museum puts its extraordinary collection in dialogue with (other) works by Franco Francese (in March) and Sergio Dangelo (in February); the Museo del Novecento delves, from October 2020 to February 2021, into Anna Valeria Borsari’s artistic journey from the 1970s to the present; the PAC explores the world of contemporary Japanese art; the Studio Museo Francesco Messina declines a Trilogy of Color (from March to June) in dialogue with its spaces and collection; the MUDEC investigates past and future cultures by exploring the influence of robotics from ancient to contemporary times(Robot, from March 4 to July 26), the art of Marc Chagall(Chagall. Love and life, October 7, 2020 to March 7, 2021), great hyperrealism (November 5, 2020 to March 21, 2021), and organizes an exhibition on Disney artists(Disney. The Art of Storytelling, from March 19 to September 13); Palazzo Reale offers major productions dedicated to Georges de la Tour (from February 7 to June 7), Mario Sironi (from October 2020 to March 2021), Magical Realism (from October 28, 2020 to February 7, 2021), as well as the Tutankhamon Experience (from February 20 to June 2), the exhibition on the fashion collections of Dolce&Gabbana (from July 11 to October 4) and the monographic exhibition on the sculpture of Francesco Somaini, from a project by Enrico Crispolti (from June 17 to September 6), which will be flanked, on the same dates, by an in-depth study, again dedicated to Somaini, at the Museo del Novecento. At Palazzo Reale, from December 1, 2020 to February 28, 2021, there will also be an in-depth look at Roberto Longhi and his collection (from Caravaggio to Giorgio Morandi), with a tribute to Anna Banti.

Major exhibitions dedicated to Titian, Edgar Degas, Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance, Maison Fabergé, and Pop Art are planned for 2021, while the PAC already has a solo exhibition by Yuri Ancarani.

Pictured: Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, detail (c. 1595-1596; oil on canvas, 65.8 x 52.3 cm; Florence, Fondazione Longhi)

Milan, here are the 2020 exhibitions: starring Disney, Roberto Longhi, Renaissance sculpture and women artists

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