Anacronismi e discronie Arte italiana dagli anni Ottanta ad oggi

Curated by Margherita de Pilati and Ivan Quaroni, the exhibition explores how, over the last forty years, a significant strand of Italian art has seemingly chosen to work “against its own time,” establishing an irregular, intermittent, or deliberately anachronistic relationship with history. Beginning in the 1980s, many artists developed forms of temporality that were out of sync with the present. In the age of the digital and the hyper-present, this suspension has become a widespread condition: works that belong neither fully to yesterday nor to today occupy an intermediate territory, where iconographic memory is continuously reassembled, interrupted, or slowed down.

Through returns to painting, iconographic recoveries, and temporal suspensions, the works outline a space in which past and present coexist dynamically, offering new perspectives on recent artistic production.

Following the conceptual season, between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the Transavanguardia brought painting and figuration back to the forefront. Artists such as Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, and Mimmo Paladino reintroduced narrative, myth, and the archaic—not as nostalgia, but as the reactivation of an iconographic repertoire deeply embedded in Italian cultural memory.

This turning point was followed by the experience of the Anachronists, who approached the past in an even more radical way: a return to form, classical composition, and a kind of painting that seemed to belong to another era. Among them were Stefano Di Stasio, Omar Galliani, Paola Gandolfi, and the outsider Carlo Maria Mariani.

The exhibition continues with a selection of “postmodern” experiences: the Nuovi-nuovi, represented for example by the renowned Salvo, Luigi Ontani, and Aldo Mondino, whose works anticipated those of the Nuovi Futuristi, characterized by a pop-inflected language drawing on advertising, design, and mass culture, as seen in the work of Marco Lodola and Umberto Postal, as well as Innocente and Plumcake. Moving between painting, object-making, and environmental installations, the Nuovo Futurismo was marked by an immediate, ironic, and self-aware approach that reflected a world increasingly dominated by media and the circulation of signs. Rather than explaining reality, these works move through it, transforming everyday codes into visual experiences that still question the role of art within a society already deeply shaped by visual languages.

Within these recurring stylistic and visual cycles, many artists engage with history—as do Paolo Ventura and Max Rohr—or with time itself, as in the work of Andrea Mastrovito and Giulia Andreani. Others confront sacred iconography, a defining feature of Nicola Samorì’s work, or myth, which is central to the practice of Francesco Vezzoli.

Equally fertile is the dialogue with traditional genres of painting: while Guglielmo Castelli chooses portraiture, Nicola Nannini, Fulvio Di Piazza, and Andrea Di Marco focus on landscape.

The history of art also informs the work of the under-35 artists featured in the exhibition, represented by Giuditta Branconi, Chiara Calore, and Martina Cinotti, whose paintings bring the exhibition to a close.