The exhibitions to see in November in Italy

With Halloween behind us, how will we fill our free time while waiting for Christmas? Many of us will settle for a refreshing nap, watch a Netflix series, or focus on a beauty routine. Others might go out for dinner with friends or attend a concert. These are all great ideas to recharge and gather good vibes, but if you're looking for a full immersion in beauty that resonates and makes you reflect on the world and yourself, you should add an art exhibition to your weekend plans. November in Italy offers a variety of fascinating exhibitions to suit personal tastes and moods. There are projects focused on the figure of the vampire and others on Ukiyoe art. Essential viewing includes retrospectives dedicated to three remarkable women artists: Inge Morath in Aosta, Lisetta Carmi in Genoa, and Niki de Saint Phalle in Milan. 

Mary Heilman - Turin

The Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin hosts the first major Italian exhibition dedicated to Mary Heilmann. Born in California, the American artist began by exploring poetry, ceramics, and sculpture before transitioning to painting after moving to New York in 1968. Over time, she developed a unique style characterized by simple shapes with loosely defined edges and a free, intuitive use of color, establishing herself as one of the most significant contemporary abstract painters. "Each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker, a spark, with which I evoke a moment from my past or a projected future," Heilmann said of her work. Inspired by this, Chiara Bertola, director of GAM, has curated a Turin exhibition featuring 60 works that range from the artist's early geometric paintings in the 1970s to recent fluorescent-colored shaped canvases. These works are inspired by key moments in her life, like surfing and the beach, as well as her love for pop culture, music, and cinema.

Title: Mary Heilmann

When: Until March 16, 2025

Where: GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin

Lisetta Carmi - Genova

The Palazzo Ducale in Genoa celebrates the 100th anniversary of Lisetta Carmi's birth with a major exhibition available until March 23, 2025. It’s a journey through the world and human condition, seen through the lens of the Genoese photographer, who, with an acute, gentle, unbiased, and honest eye, documented life on society's margins. Alternating between black-and-white and previously unseen color images, the exhibition includes photos taken in Italy and moving reportages from travels in Venezuela and India in the late 1960s, as well as many images of her hometown, Genoa, including the unpublished series Erotismo e autoritarismo a Staglieno, set in the historic Ligurian cemetery. Her best-known series, I travestiti, documents those who felt they couldn’t live their gender identity freely. On New Year's Eve in 1965, Carmi accepted an invitation to a party in Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, where she discovered the community of transvestites in Via del Campo, which she documented anthropologically through her camera, creating a milestone in photography history, comparable to the work of Christer Strömholm and Nan Goldin.

Title: Lisetta Carmi, molto vicino incredibilmente lontano

When: Until March 23, 2025

Where: Palazzo Ducale, Genoa

Inge Morath - Aosta

Born in Graz in 1923, Inge Morath studied languages in Berlin and Bucharest, worked as an assistant to Ernst Haas and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and was the first female photographer to be named a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos agency. Those wanting to learn more shouldn’t miss the exhibition at the Centro Saint-Bénin in Aosta, open until March 16, 2025. It features over 150 images and original documents, organized into fourteen thematic sections that trace Morath's career, from her early photos taken in Venice in 1955 to collaborations with top magazines such as Picture Post, Life, Paris Match, Saturday Evening Post, and Vogue. Her work spans travel reports from Spain, England, Iran, France, Austria, Mexico, Ireland, Romania, the U.S., and China. Morath used to say, "Photography is essentially a personal matter, a search for inner truth," a sentiment reflected in her meticulous work and unique sensitivity, capturing her subjects' deepest intimacies.

Title: Inge Morath. La fotografia è una questione personale

When: Until March 16, 2025

Where: Centro Saint-Bénin, Aosta

Niki de Saint Phalle - Milan

Now considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Niki de Saint Phalle described herself as both a woman and an artist. A painter, sculptor, experimental filmmaker, and performer, her work challenged prejudices and shattered societal stereotypes, creating a colorful, rounded, and multifaceted world. She adopted a joyful, inclusive approach to art to rewrite the rules of power and pave the way for a fairer society. MUDEC in Milan presents a comprehensive retrospective open until February 16, 2024. The exhibit, organized into eight sections, includes drawings, works on paper, video installations, and a refined selection of Dior Maison garments, recalling her past as a model. Highlighted are her large sculptures, such as the Nanas, uninhibited and kaleidoscopic dancers. Fun fact: her first Nana was inspired by Clarice Rivers, a pregnant friend of Niki's and wife of painter Larry Rivers.

Title: Niki de Saint Phalle

When: Until February 16, 2025

Where: MUDEC - Museo delle Culture, Milan

Hokusai - Pisa

Literally translatable as “images of the floating world,” Ukiyo-e is an artistic genre that emerged in Japan’s Edo period (1603-1868), reflecting the lifestyle and tastes of the new rising classes in the city now known as Tokyo. If you are captivated by its cultural refinement, Katsushika Hokusai is an artist you must explore. His most famous work, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, appears everywhere—from T-shirts to calendars—but his artistic output extends far beyond iconic landscapes and scenic views. Throughout his career, he combined traditional Japanese painting with Western techniques, creating prints of famous locations, illustrated volumes, hand-painted scrolls, and surimono, cards and invitations designed for a sophisticated and elite clientele. This exhibition, open until February 23, 2025, at Palazzo Blu in Pisa, showcases over 200 works, including masterpieces never displayed before, solidifying Hokusai’s reputation as an eccentric, multifaceted artist—elegant and poetic, influencing artists like Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Émile Gallé, as well as many contemporary creators. The exhibit also includes Memory of Waves, an immersive work by the renowned collective TeamLab, which reinterprets Hokusai’s signature wave motif through a technologically enhanced and captivating language. 

Title: Hokusai

When: Until February 23, 2025

Where: Palazzo Blu, Pisa

Fernando Botero - Rome

Rome celebrates the talent of Fernando Botero with a major retrospective. Palazzo Bonaparte hosts over 120 pieces, filling its rooms with paintings, watercolors, sanguine drawings, charcoals, sculptures, and some previously unseen works. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Botero’s medium and large-scale depictions of the rounded forms of the female figure, which are also reflected in his versions of iconic works from art history, such as Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Raphael’s La Fornarina. Additionally, a room is dedicated to the master’s later experimentation with watercolor on canvas, a delicate and almost translucent technique he began in 2019. Themes like the circus and bullfighting provide a thematic continuity, but it is above all the exaggerated proportions of Botero's figures—with their massive, voluptuous physicality and vibrant colors—that evoke Latin American traditions and create a powerful visual impact, characteristic of his style. 

Title: Fernando Botero. La grande mostra

When: Until January 10, 2025

Where: Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome

Colm Mac Athlaoich - Turin

Born in 1980 in Dublin, Colm Mac Athlaoich studied at the National College of Art and Design before relocating to Brussels, where he currently resides. His work explores materiality, process, and perception, often inspired by his early career as a printmaker, illustrator, and musician. Curious to see more? The Weber & Weber Gallery in Turin presents his exhibition Love is the Drug, a collection of dreamlike works in which the Irish artist captures a series of fleeting moments and images from a year’s passing. The result hovers between figuration and abstraction, existing in the liminal space where magic happens, revealing a kaleidoscopic and ever-evolving reality. 

Title: Colm Mac Athlaoich - Love is the drug

When: Until December 7, 2024

Where: Weber & Weber Gallery, Turin

Vampires - Cremona

The term “vampire” first appeared in European literature around 1730, but the origins of this figure reach far back, spread across cultures and religions worldwide. From the Mesopotamian myth of Lilitu (Lilith), demon of the night, to the belle dame sans merci of early Romanticism, to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu, and even Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, based on Anne Rice’s novel, this enigmatic figure at the boundary between life and death, good and evil, has continued to fascinate. Born of this fascination, the exhibition Vampires: Illustration and Literature between Blood Cult and Return from the Dead, hosted by the Civic Museum of Crema and Cremasco, explores the phenomenon and the figure of the vampire through over 200 works sourced from 20 Italian public libraries and private collectors, including literary and poetic texts, engravings, rare editions, and other iconographic materials. 

Title: Vampiri. Illustrazione e letteratura tra culto del sangue e ritorno dalla morte

When: Until January 12, 2025

Where: Civic Museum of Crema and Cremasco, Cremona

Claudio Di Carlo - Pesaro

Curated by Lorenzo Canova and Francesca Pietracci, Claudio Di Carlo’s solo exhibition Vertigini all’imbrunire (Vertigo at Dusk) is on display at Palazzo Mosca in Pesaro until December 8, 2024. It opens with Already the Moon is in the Mid-Sea, a painting dedicated to Rossini for the composer’s birthplace, followed by nine works created with oil and gold leaf on canvas between 2007 and 2024. Other works continue the themes of human figures and details suspended in an undefined atmosphere, balanced between reality and fiction. The effect is captivating and disorienting, designed to induce a sense of vertigo and displacement. 

Title: Claudio Di Carlo - Vertigini all’imbrunire

When: Until December 8, 2024

Where: Palazzo Mosca, Pesaro

Chiara Fumai - Polignano a Mare

Italian artist Chiara Fumai, of Apulian origin, graduated in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Milan and attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at the Fondazione Ratti. Starting her career as a DJ in the 1990s under the name Pippi Langstrumpf, she later turned to performance art, using her body as a medium, a vessel of stories, and a symbol of marginalized and rebellious women from different times and places. Her work, imbued with deconstruction, freak show aesthetics, metaphysics, cross-dressing, DJ sets, sisterhood, and resistance against censorship and societal constraints, is a universe worth discovering for those unfamiliar with her. The exhibition Chiara says Chiara, curated by Andrea Bellini and Milovan Farronato, revisits Fumai’s entire artistic journey, including her early video The Moustache Woman (2007) and the sound installation Shut Up, Actually Talk (2012). Fun fact: the exhibition’s title is inspired by I Say I, a 1971 feminist text by Carla Lonzi.

Title: Chiara says Chiara

When: Until January 12, 2025

Where: Fondazione Pascali, Polignano a Mare

Mantero - Variation 00 - Milan

We wrap up with a special event. Mantero, a Como-based brand with 122 years of history, opens its archive with Variation 00. This time, Italian designer and creative Giorgio Di Salvo reinterprets one of the Archive’s collections through his unique vision. Founder of United Standard, a fashion brand merging streetwear elements with functional design and a strong visual identity, Di Salvo stands out for his attention to detail and use of technical materials. The project will be previewed at a private event on Thursday, November 7th at Museo Bagatti Valsecchi on Via Gesù 5 in Milan, and will then open to the public for three days, November 8-9-10. It will be displayed alongside the museum's permanent collection and the current exhibition—a must-see event!

Title: Variation 00

When: November 8-10

Where: Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, Milan