What to see in Milan in 2024? Museums, exhibitions, art, photography, great masters and contemporary artists, from Picasso to Tim Burton.
Great masters of the twentieth century such as Picasso, Cézanne and Renoir, Munch, De Nittis, Baj, but also the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, the photographers Mulas and Parr, the African-American artist Adrian Piper, up to Tim Burton: these are just a few of the artists who will be protagonists with their works of the exhibition program of the Municipality of Milan in 2024-2025.
From Palazzo Reale to MUDEC, from GAM to Castello Sforzesco, to the Fabbrica del Vapore: modern and contemporary art, in its many expressions, will be the protagonist in the places of culture in Milan, thanks to the collaboration with prestigious international cultural institutions.
“In 2023, 3.2 million people visited the museums and exhibition venues of the Municipality”, declared the mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala: a result that makes us proud and which, together with the excellent results recorded by tourism last year, they tell of a contemporary, attractive and culturally interesting Milan.”
Among the most anticipated is the exhibition “Picasso the stranger”, promoted by the Municipality of Milan and produced by Palazzo Reale with Marsilio Arte, created thanks to the collaboration of the National Picasso Museum of Paris (MNPP), the main lender. The original idea of the project came from Annie Cohen-Solal, scientific curator of the exhibition with the special curatorship of Cécile Debray and the collaboration of Sébastien Delot, respectively president and director of the collections of the MNPP. It presents more than 80 works by the artist, as well as documents, photographs, letters and videos, in a reflection on the theme of immigration and the relationship between people, through a journey through Picasso’s life, with ceramics, drawings, photographs, prints , videos and documents.
The artist, who moved to Paris in 1904, never obtained French citizenship, despite feeling that France was his home. Thanks to intense research in the archives of the French police and with a multidisciplinary approach, Annie Cohen-Solal has brought to light documents that had been lying in the archives for decades. “I found documents, fingerprints and photographs that demonstrate how the police considered Picasso a stranger and an outcast,” says the curator, “All his life he was kept under surveillance for three reasons: he did not speak French and was treated like a foreigner; he was suspected of being an anarchist and, finally, as an avant-garde artist, he was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts.”
Not even when he was consecrated as one of the greatest living artists of the time, Picasso was considered a true French citizen. The exhibition explores how the condition of a foreigner influenced and shaped his identity and invites reflection on contemporaneity. Set up in the rooms of Palazzo Reale, the exhibition dedicated to Picasso will be open to the public from 20 September 2024 to 2 February 2025.
France is also the protagonist of the exhibition that inaugurates the 2024 exhibition season of Palazzo Reale, with the first and most complete – with 90 paintings – monographic dedicated to Giuseppe De Nittis, who was, together with Boldini, the greatest of the Italians in Paris, where he compared himself with Manet, Degas and the Impressionists. Even the images exhibited since February at Palazzo Reale in the exhibition dedicated to the photographer Brassaï, Hungarian by birth but Parisian by adoption, immediately identify the face of Paris, where he worked in close relationship with artists such as Picasso, Dalì and Matisse, he was close to surrealist movement and participated in the great cultural ferment that hit the French capital in those years.
An epic comparison between two key figures of Impressionism, Cézanne and Renoir, will inhabit the rooms of Palazzo Reale in spring: fifty masterpieces that retrace the lives of two masters who contributed to the birth of one of the most important movements in the history of modern art , which saw its birth and affirmation in Paris.
Milan also dedicates another exhibition to Picasso, at the MUDEC – Museum of Cultures of Milan, in collaboration with the main Spanish museums and the artist’s heirs. Curated by Malén Gual and Ricardo Ostalé and open from 22 February to 30 June 2024, it will bring into dialogue a nucleus of paintings, drawings and sculptures by Picasso with the “primitive” artistic sources, which influenced him from the beginning of his career, including whose artefacts of African art. With a focus on the study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the exhibition also investigates the concept of metamorphosis of the figure, which accompanies all his artistic production, and ends with a section dedicated to Picasso’s legacy, through a focus on the African artists who today they are inspired by the works of the great twentieth century painter.
From February, MUDEC will propose an appointment, in collaboration with Magnum Photos, with the reportage and documentary photography of Martin Parr. On display are over two hundred shots by the great English photographer, who explored contemporary society and its most contradictory aspects, without filters and beyond any rhetoric.
Contemporary art will find its place of choice at the PAC – Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan, which in the spring will continue its investigation of the big names on the international scene with the first European retrospective of the African-American artist Adrian Piper. With loans from the most important international museums including the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York and the Tate Modern in London, the exhibition will retrace over sixty years of the artist’s career and will tell the story of his permanent fight against racism, misogyny, xenophobia, hatred and social injustice.
In the summer, however, an exhibition project, co-produced with the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and in collaboration with Magazzino Italian Art in New York, will feature Liliana Moro. She is a Milanese visual artist, among the founders of the space in via Lazzaro Palazzi in Milan, and among the editors of the Tiracorrendo magazine. From November, a project designed specifically for the PAC and dedicated to Milan will retrace the entire production of Marcello Maloberti.
From autumn 2024 at Palazzo Reale we will return to the great Italian and international protagonists of modern art, with the large exhibition dedicated to Enrico Baj, conceived on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and the large retrospective of Edvard Munch, created on the occasion of the eighty years since his death and forty years since his last exhibition in Milan. Munch’s art will be explored from 1880 until his death in 1944, through one hundred works including paintings, drawings and prints, all from the Munch Museet in Oslo.
Also at Palazzo Reale, an anthology on the work of Ugo Mulas will be inaugurated on 3 October 2024 and can be visited until 26 January 2025. Created in collaboration with the Mulas Archive and curated by Denis Curti and Alberto Salvadori, it will include over 200 photographs and will tell the relationship between the photographer and the city of Milan, through the shots dedicated to its protagonists, coming from the world of art, design, work and industry. The exhibition will follow all the stages of the photographer’s career: from his debut in Milan at Bar Jamaica to the Venice Art Biennale, to his experiences with design, fashion and theatre.
In the spaces of Fabbrica del Vapore, among others, the “Labirynth” exhibition by Tim Burton will be set up, an exciting journey into the creative universe of the director of Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Chocolate Factory, and other films. From December 2024, in the different rooms of the labyrinth it will be possible to explore the themes of the director, producer, writer and artist, thanks to technology, lights, sounds, original works of art and sets from his films.
In 2025, the Shirin Neshat exhibition is scheduled at PAC, the first large-scale solo exhibition in Italy of the Iranian artist who, through her filmic and photographic works, explores the identity representations of the feminine and masculine in her culture, through the lens of her experiences of belonging and exile.
We also have to wait until 2025 for the anthological exhibition on Felice Casorati, the first after the famous exhibition in 1990. The itinerary, created with the collaboration of the Casorati Archive, will present a series of works from public and private collections. Curated by Giorgina Bertolino, Fernando Mazzocca and Francesco Poli, the exhibition highlights Casorati’s eclecticism, capable of ranging from sculpture to drawing, from graphics to illustration, up to music, which led him to experiment as a set and costume designer .
This will be followed by the monographic exhibition dedicated to Leonor Fini, a surrealist and multifaceted artist who addressed fundamental issues such as gender identity and the analysis and criticism of family models consolidated in her contemporary society. In autumn, the first solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Leonora Carrington in Italy, which will take into consideration her all-round figure as a woman artist, migrant, exile, mother, avant-garde feminist, ecologist and artist.
But that’s not all: other exhibitions are already scheduled in Milan for the two-year period 2024-2025 and new proposals will be added.
To consult the complete program with all the details and always stay updated: https://www.yesmilano.it/eventi/tutti-gli-eventi/mostre-milano-2024-2025