The exhibitions to see in March in Italy
From the eclectic Leonor Fini to the street art of Alessandra Carloni
G-Club
March 6th, 2025
March 6th, 2025
Art exhibitions in Italy offer an extraordinary journey through different eras, languages, and themes that transcend time and cultures. And this month, in celebration of International Women's Day, why not focus on the world of female artistry? There are many incredible women artists to discover and fall in love with—from the powerful visual narratives of Leonor Fini and Shirin Neshat in Milan to the historic images of Dorothea Lange in Perugia and the artistic explorations of Barbara Cammarata in Catania. Not to mention the street art of Alessandra Carloni in the province of Modena or the raw, visceral works of Tracey Emin, on display in Florence.
The must-see exhibitions in Italy this March
Leonor Fini - Milan
The Palazzo Reale in Milan is hosting a retrospective on Leonor Fini, a rebellious and provocative artist who navigated the European cultural scene from the 1930s until the end of the century, without ever conforming to a single movement or label. "I am a painter. When they ask me how I do it, I reply: 'I am.'" From this statement comes the exhibition title, Io sono Leonor Fini, celebrating this multifaceted figure—painter, set designer, costume designer, writer, and illustrator. The exhibition presents over 100 works, including paintings, drawings, photographs, costumes, and videos, into nine thematic sections. Visitors are immersed in the artist’s world, filled with female figures, primal and untamed forces, sphinxes, cat-women, and guardians, set in mysterious and sometimes unsettling atmospheres that challenge social, sexual, and gender identity conventions. The exhibition traces Fini’s influences, from the Central European culture of Trieste to Renaissance masters, Surrealism, and Freudian psychology, which led her to explore the mind and dreams.
Title: Io sono Leonor Fini
When: Until June 22, 2025
Where: Palazzo Reale, Milan
Tracey Emin - Florence
Tracey Emin's art is direct, raw, brutally emotional, yet vulnerable and visceral. Her works, balancing between confession and provocation, are autobiographical and explore love, loss, identity, the body, and desire. More than 60 pieces—including some exhibited in Italy for the first time—are part of Sex and Solitude, the grand exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, dedicated to one of the most influential contemporary artists. Emin has worked across painting, drawing, video, photography, and sculpture since the 1990s. One of her most iconic works is My Bed, an installation featuring her own unmade bed surrounded by trash. "In 1998, I broke up with my partner and spent four days in bed, sleeping, in a semi-conscious state. When I woke up, I got up and saw the chaos that had accumulated inside and outside the sheets," Emin recalls in a video on the Tate Britain website. This exhibition provides a deeper insight into her world.
Title: Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude
When: March 16 – July 20, 2025
Where: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
WOMEN POWER - Abano Terme
On March 22, the Museo Villa Bassi Rathgeb in Abano Terme will inaugurate WOMEN POWER. The Female Universe in Magnum Agency Photographs from Post-War to Today. The exhibition explores the role of women from World War II to the present through the unique perspectives of female photographers like Inge Morath, Eve Arnold, Olivia Arthur, Susan Meiselas, Lúa Ribeira, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Marilyn Silverstone, as well as the women portrayed in their photographs. The exhibition, created in collaboration with CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia and Magnum Photos, is divided into six thematic sections: family, growth, identity, beauty and fame myths, political struggles, and war. From Marilyn Monroe's portraits to those of FARC fighters in Colombia, each image tells a story of social and cultural changes in the female world.
Title: WOMEN POWER. L’universo femminile nelle fotografie dell’Agenzia Magnum dal dopoguerra a oggi
When: March 22 – September 21, 2025
Where: Museo Villa Bassi Rathgeb, Abano Terme
Yto Barrada - Turin
Returning to the essentials to unlock new energies—between ecological thought and experimentation—this is the concept behind DEADHEAD, an exhibition open until May 18 at Fondazione Merz in Turin. The show features films, sculptures, installations, textiles, and prints by Yto Barrada, some of which have been specially created for this occasion. A central theme is color, inspired by the 1902 book Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, which aimed to educate women—seamstresses, decorators, florists—on the "music of light." The exhibition’s title, DEADHEAD, references the gardening technique of removing wilted flowers and leaves to encourage new growth.
Title: DEADHEAD
When: fino al 18 maggio 2025
Where: Fondazione Merz, Turin
Alessandra Carloni - Pavullo nel Frignano
Alessandra Carloni, born in 1984 in Rome, is considered one of the best Italian street art artists. For those eager to discover her work, a trip to Emilia-Romagna is highly recommended, specifically to the Contemporary Art Gallery at Palazzo Ducale Pavullo nel Frignano, where over forty of her pieces are on display, including paintings, videos, and skateboards. The exhibition, titled Tracce, takes visitors by the hand and invites them to lose themselves in Carloni’s unreal, fantastical, and colorful worlds, where flying machines, wandering human hybrids, curious characters, and floating cities coexist in an alternative reality. Her favorite themes are easy to spot in the exhibition: travel, human hybrids, masks, and urban art. Feeling intrigued?
Title: TRACCE
When: Until May 5, 2025
Where: Contemporary Art Gallery, Palazzo Ducale, Pavullo nel Frignano (Modena)
Shirin Neshat - Milan
On March 28, internationally renowned Iranian artist Shirin Neshat will inaugurate her first solo exhibition in Italy at the PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan. This is an opportunity to explore over thirty years of her career, during which she has developed a powerful and distinctive visual language, balancing lyricism and social commitment, past and present, East and West. Her work addresses themes such as identity, power, religion, resistance, and the female condition. The exhibition allows visitors to get up close to nearly 200 photographic works and around ten video installations, spanning from her early series Women of Allah, where the female body merges with poetry and calligraphy, to the video installation The Fury, which tackles the subject of sexual violence and imprisonment in Iran, inspired by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
Title: BODY OF EVIDENCE
When: March 28 – June 8, 2025
Where: PAC - Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan
Grace Lee - Naples
There is only a short time left, until March 21, to visit Grace Lee’s exhibition in Naples. At Galleria Solito, the British artist presents a selection of unpublished works inspired by a scene from Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s iconic film: a shark’s head emerging from the sea in front of beachgoers. "That moment, the entire existence is there; that instant when you are just before disappearing. Swallowed in one bite, eaten, gone," says Lee. In Uncut, she reinterprets scenes and frames from the film, exploring the intricate relationship between image, memory, and the artistic evolution in the digital era. The exhibition also invites visitors to engage in the same reflection.
Title: Uncut
When: Until March 21, 2025
Where: Galleria Solito, Naples
Barbara Cammarata - Catania
An Interspecies Journey occupies the two monumental pavilions of the Fondazione Brodbeck, showcasing over 60 paintings, 10 textile sculptures, and several environmental installations created by Barbara Cammarata between 2018 and 2024. Curators Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Patrizia Monterosso describe the exhibition as "an extraordinary journey into a world where the metaphor of an interspecies social pact is politically recognized and fully operative, connecting humans with the animal, vegetal, and technological realms. Here, the ‘similar’ and the ‘different’ coexist in a symbiotic dimension of vitality and growth, where sharing becomes a form of ethical, moral, philosophical, and even religious transformation, capable of generating a new order."
Title: Barbara Cammarata. An Interspecies Journey
When: Until June 8, 2025
Where: Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania
Dorothea Lange - Perugia
Only a few days remain before the closing of the Dorothea Lange exhibition at Palazzo della Penna – Center for Contemporary Arts in Perugia. Until March 23, visitors can admire over 130 photographs, retracing a crucial decade in the artist’s career—between the 1930s and 1940s, when she documented the seismic events that reshaped the economic and social fabric of the United States. Lange’s photographs, including the iconic 1936 portrait Migrant Mother, capture Southern U.S. farmers and their families, devastated by drought and dust storms. This exhibition is a must-see for photography enthusiasts.
Title: Dorothea Lange
When: Until March 23, 2025
Where: Palazzo della Penna – Center for Contemporary Arts, Perugia
Essere Donna - Milan
As Oriana Fallaci wrote, "Being a woman is an adventure that requires great courage, a challenge that never ends." Inspired by this idea, curators Maria Vittoria Baravelli and Annamaria Maggi have organized an exhibition at Galleria Fumagalli in Milan, bringing together iconic works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Sang A Han, Annette Messager, Shirin Neshat, and Gina Pane. They explain that "being a woman is not a gender but a way of seeing the world, of experiencing the conquest and loss through one's own body." The exhibition features rebellious and defiant artists who have challenged patriarchy, dismantled traditions, and refused passivity. They use their bodies as tools of resistance, self-expression, and transformation, redefining what it means to be a woman—one artwork at a time.
Title: Essere Donna. Il corpo come strumento di creazione e atto di ribellione
When: March 5 – May 30, 2025
Where: Galleria Fumagalli, Milan
