The history of contemporary Italian art told through irony: an exhibition at MAMbo in Bologna

From Feb. 6 to Sept. 7, 2025, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna del Settore Musei Civici Bologna presents the major group exhibition Facile ironia. Irony in Italian art between the 20th and 21st centuries, curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni. The exhibition is supported by the main sponsor Gruppo Hera and is part of the institutional program of ART CITY Bologna 2025 created on the occasion of Arte Fiera.

Designed for the spaces of the Sala delle Ciminiere, the exhibition displays more than one hundred works and archival documents by more than seventy artists, spanning a time span of about seventy years, from the 1950s to the present. Intent is to trace the history of Italian art through the theme ofirony.

The ironic dimension charged with imaginative power of Bruno Munari, the irreverence of Piero Manzoni, the vertigo of paradox of Gino De Dominicis. Irony intertwines with the political sphere with Piero Gilardi and Michelangelo Pistoletto, the challenge to female stereotypes by Tomaso Binga and Mirella Bentivoglio, the linguistic experimentation of nonsense by Adriano Spatola and Giulia Niccolai. With Maurizio Cattelan, Paola Pivi and Francesco Vezzoli the contradictory juxtaposition of subjects and situations exploits irony to reveal the inconsistencies of the present, while Chiara Fumai and Italo Zuffi with their works unmask the unwritten rules of the art system. And again, the artistic duo Eva and Franco Mattes reveal a humorous form that characterizes the Web today.

Already in the ancient world, thanks to Socrates and Plato, irony is “the art of asking questions”: a tool that allows human beings to have a more lucid and disenchanted look at reality, since it is able to reveal its anomalies and contradictions. Through humorous games, parodies and wisecracks, irony also becomes an antidote, an amusing alternative to protect man from what ails him.

The title of the exhibition is meant to call out the apparent simplicity of the phenomenon while at the same time revealing its inherent complexity, inviting the audience to question the nature of language, commonplaces and how they influence our observation and interpretation of the world around us.

Italian artists from multiple generations have shared the ironic strategy. In the exhibition, the theme is narrated through macro-areas to illustrate the different declinations of irony and the trans-historicity of the phenomenon: paradox, its connection with play, irony as a feminist weapon of critique of patriarchy and the Italian social order, its relation to political mobilization, irony as a form of institutional critique, as a practice of nonsense and finally as dark humor.

The exhibition layout is curated by Filippo Bisagni, who was inspired by the renovation project of the former Forno del Pane, the site designated to house MAMbo, by Milanese architect Aldo Rossi.

For info: www.museibologna.it/mambo

Hours: Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., Thursdays from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. From Feb. 6 to 9, 2025, during ART CITY Bologna, special openings with extended hours are planned.

The history of contemporary Italian art told through irony: an exhibition at MAMbo in Bologna

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