The exhibitions to see in April in Italy

Spring, daylight saving time, longer and warmer days, wardrobe changes, lighter clothing, and that je ne sais quoi that awakens within us, as if the new season brings a spark of hope for the future… So many changes come with this time of year. What remains the same? The art that invades and permeates Italy. From the north to the south of the peninsula, there are numerous exhibitions to visit. From April 7 to 13, Milan comes alive once again with Design Week, accompanied by a myriad of Fuorisalone events. Not far away, in Brescia, the 8th edition of the Brescia Photo Festival has just been inaugurated. Running until summer, it includes a retrospective on Joel Meyerowitz and showcases dedicated to Giorgio Lotti and Maria Vittoria Backhaus. In Campania, more precisely in Maddaloni, art lovers can visit the first edition of the AMA Biennale until April 21. This festival combines art, design, and architecture, aiming to enhance the city's historical and social heritage through urban and cultural regeneration. Not enough for you? In Bologna, you’ll find works by Jack Vettriano; in Naples, those of Tomaso Binga; in Venice, those of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva; and in Pistoia, pieces by Daniel Buren.

The must-see exhibitions in Italy this April

Jack Vettriano - Bologna

Jack Vettriano was born in Fife, Scotland, in 1951 to a family of Italian origin. He left school at 15 to work as a mining assistant. Everything changed when, for his 21st birthday, a girl gave him a box of watercolor paints, sparking his artistic journey. His debut exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1988 was a success. Critics and the public alike admired his glamorous yet melancholic paintings, infused with cinematic atmospheres, enigmatic characters, soft lighting, and a noir mood that evokes stories of romance, solitude, and desire. Music often serves as his inspiration, evident in both ballroom scenes and the titles of his works, such as Dance Me to the End of Love and The Singing Butler, which was sold in 2004 for £750,000—a record for a Scottish artist. For those eager to learn more about Jack Vettriano, Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna will be hosting an exhibition featuring 70 pieces, including oil paintings and limited edition prints created specifically for the occasion, until July 20, 2025.

Title: Jack Vettriano

When: until July 20, 2025

Where: Palazzo Pallavicini, Bologna

Giosetta Fioroni - Turin

Giosetta Fioroni is one of the most influential figures of the late 20th century. Born in Rome in 1932 into a family of artists, she developed an early talent and a keen interest in the power of the gaze, particularly in shaping identity and representing the female condition. As the only female member of the renowned Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, alongside Franco Angeli, Mario Schifano, and Tano Festa, Fioroni has worked across painting, performance, and ceramics from the 1960s to today. What many don’t know is that in 1967, she created four 16mm films. Regarding them, Fioroni once said: "I was seeking a lightness reminiscent of an old Lumière sequence, something fleeting, something that could suggest to the viewer a trembling, an extreme delicacy—an appearance, a fading away." From April 16 to September 7, 2025, these films will be on display at GAM – Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin.

Title: Giosetta Fioroni

When: April 16 to September 07, 2025

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

Tomaso Binga - Naples

The largest museum retrospective dedicated to Tomaso Binga, the artistic pseudonym of Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, is titled Euforia. Hosted by the Fondazione Donnaregina at the Madre Museum, the exhibition opens on April 17, 2025, and runs until July 22, 2025. It features over 120 works, including visual poetry, installations, photographs, collages, and performance documents, tracing Binga’s 40-year career of challenging social and cultural conventions while exploring themes of gender and linguistic critique. Do you know about her alphabets, where the artist’s body takes the shape of letters?

Title: Tomaso Binga EUFORIA

When: April 17 to July 22, 2025

Where: Museo MADRE, Naples

Frigidaire - Rome

In 1980, Andrea Pazienza, Tanino Liberatore, Massimo Mattioli, and Stefano Tamburini, together with Vincenzo Sparagna and Filippo Scòzzari, launched Frigidaire—a revolutionary magazine spanning art, satire, music, politics, literature, philosophy, comics, and journalism. It was the first Italian magazine to publish a report on the HIV virus in 1983. Curious? The Museum of Rome in Trastevere is hosting a spectacular exhibition until September 7, 2025, featuring over 300 pieces, including iconic issues, covers, original drawings, and investigative reports.

Title: Frigidaire. Storia e immagini della più rivoluzionaria rivista d’arte del mondo

When: until 07 September 2025

Where: Museum of Rome in Trastevere, Rome

Joel Meyerowitz - Brescia

As part of the 8th Brescia Photo Festival, the city hosts the first major Italian retrospective of Joel Meyerowitz, a master of contemporary photography. Through August 24, 2025, the Museum of Santa Giulia presents over 90 images organized by thematic chapters, all of which are accumulated by a certain intimacy, or "the capacity for identification and total immersion in what his eye sees and his lens translates into images." The exhibition includes pioneering black-and-white photographs from the 1960s, shots taken in the United States and during the Vietnam War, images taken in the 1980s on Cape Cod and nature on the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts, as well as still life and shots at the World Trade Center in New York in the days following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A focus is devoted to the 365 self-shots Meyerowitz took, day by day, during the 2020 lockdown.

Title: JOEL MEYEROWITZ. A Sense of Wonder. Fotografie 1962-2022

When: through Aug. 24, 2025

Where: Santa Giulia Museum, Brescia

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva - Venice

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was one of 31 artists featured in Exhibition by 31 Women, a groundbreaking 1943 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in New York, the first exhibition project in the United States focused exclusively on the work of women artists. Now, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is hosting a retrospective on Vieira da Silva from April 12 to September 15, 2025. This seems almost like the closing of a circle or the continuation of a relationship cemented by talent and love of art. The new exhibition will trace the highlights of Vieira da Silva's career, from the 1930s to the late 1980s, with a focus on his ability to transform pictorial space into abstract environments and optical illusions, which at the same time recalls and goes beyond avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism.

Title: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Anatomia di uno spazio

When: April 12 to September 15, 2025

Where: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Saints, Sirens, Bandits, and Bacchanalia - Palermo

There are only a few days left—until April 26, 2025—to visit this collective exhibition at Rizzuto Gallery in Palermo. Featuring Mattia Barbieri, Francesco De Grandi, Daniele Franzella, and Luigi Presicce, the show explores archetypal themes such as religion, mythology, and folklore through various artistic styles, combined with the existential and political challenges of the present. The result ranges from great medieval frescoes to ancient bestiaries, from visions of magic realism to sculpture.

Title: SAINTS, SIRENS, BRIGANTS AND BACCANALS

When: until April 26, 2025

Where: Rizzuto Gallery, Palermo

Giovanni Pintori - Nuoro

The MAN Museum in Nuoro presents a monographic exhibition dedicated to Giovanni Pintori, a master of graphic design known for shaping Olivetti’s iconic image. Thanks to more than 300 works, including drawings, original sketches, advertising pages and photographs, the exhibition traces 50 years of activity during which Pintori transformed advertising into an artistic language that changed the face of visual communication. The project, developed in collaboration with the m.a.x. museum in Chiasso, sheds light on the innovative creative choices and extraordinary modernity of Pintori's graphic language, making them known to those who had not yet my heard of the talent born in 1912 in Tresnuraghes (Oristano).

Title: Giovanni Pintori (1912-1999). Pubblicità come arte

When: until June 15, 2025

Where: MAN Museum, Nuoro

Daniel Buren - Pistoia

Daniel Buren conquers Pistoia. His art, which has always transformed architectural spaces through shapes, colors and materials, occupies the venues of Palazzo Buontalenti, Palazzo de' Rossi and Antico Palazzo dei Vescovi until July 27, to extend beyond the museum spaces to the city and surrounding area. The title of the exhibition? Daniel Buren. Making, Unmaking, Remaking, words that also explain the concept: a selection of historical and recent works by the French artist, distinguished by the pattern of alternating vertical stripes, white and colored, always 8.7 centimeters wide, combined with some works created or recreated and invested with new meanings by Buren specifically for Pistoia.

Title: Daniel Buren. Making, Unmaking, Remaking

When: through July 27, 2025

Where: Buontalenti Palace, Pistoia

Mimmo Jodice - Naples

The spaces of the Palatine Chapel, the Chapel of the Souls in Purgatory and the Castel Nuovo Armory will host Mimmo Jodice. Metaphysical Naples. The exhibition, divided into chapters inspired by certain archetypes of metaphysical imagery, consists of more than fifty photographic portraits of Naples. All are characterized by Jodice's recognizable, lyrical and radical style and are full of references that seem to dialogue with de Chirico's paintings. This is the exhibition to discover a new Naples or to fall even more in love with the city.

Titolo: Mimmo Jodice. Metaphysical Naples

When: April 13 through September 1, 2025

Where: Castel Nuovo, Naples