“Open, fluid, polyinstrumental.” With these three keywords, Nicola Ricciardi, director of Miart for the fourth consecutive year, describes the modern and contemporary art fair to Domus. The 28th edition, organized by Fiera Milano, will take place from April 12th to 14th. Just “like water struggles to impose limits and boundaries,“the 2024 edition of Miart is “open to the city, to new audiences, to unprecedented collaborations,” and is accompanied by “numerous initiatives that link art and music, and much more” - continues Ricciardi.
What not to miss at Miart and Milan Art Week 2024
From the fair, introduced to Domus by director Nicola Ricciardi, to the must-see events in the city, here’s everything you need to know about the week when Milan becomes the capital of art.
Adrian Piper, Safe, 1990. © Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA). Foundation Berlin. Photo: Andrej Glusgold
Adrian Piper, What It’s Like, What It Is #3, 1991. © Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation Berlin. Photo: David Campos
Paola Pivi, Leopard, 2007-2023. Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo. Photo by Hugo Glendinning
Patrizio di Massimo, Autoritratto con lacrime, 2024. Courtesy Patrizio di Massimo
David Horvitz, Imagined Clouds (Berlin), 2016. Courtesy of David Horvitz, Los Angeles and ChertLüdde
David Horvitz, “nuvola nuvola tu nuvola”, 2018. Courtesy David Horvitz, Los Angeles and ChertLüdde
David Horvitz, When the Ocean Sounds (Waves). Courtesy David Horvitz, Los Angeles and ChertLüdde
Michele Gabriele, July 2nd. Courtesy Michele Gabriele and Ashes/Ashes
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, BROOD (Scene 4). Courtesy Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
View of the studio of Andrea Kvas. Courtesy Andrea Kvas
Andrea Kvas, Senza titolo, 2021. Courtesy Andrea Kvas
View Article details
- Irene Sofia Comi
- 07 April 2024
As the title of this year’s edition suggests, “No Time No Space,” inspired by a piece by Franco Battiato, the goal is to increasingly extend and permeate the thematic, spatial, and temporal boundaries of Miart by including new curated sections within the fair and spreading unpublished artistic projects throughout the city.
The art week precedes Milan Design Week, and this year, the desired collaboration between the two has materialized. Addressing the relationship between Miart's focus on visual art and the section dedicated to design, Ricciardi explains, “I’ve never found it useful to force myself to define objects as either art or design. So, there are no distinct and distinguishable labels or sections within the fair. I think that both worlds have always had many contact points and have naturally blended, contaminated, and intertwined. The proximity of the Art Week and the Design Week in Milan accentuates this synergy. In fact, there's content featured in the art fair that crosses over to the Design Week and numerous interdisciplinary collaborations, such as the partnership between Miart and Fuorisalone.it, created with the goal of mutually showcasing both events through guides that talk about Milan’s galleries to design enthusiasts and vice versa.”
I’ve never found it useful to force myself to define objects as either art or design. So, there are no distinct and distinguishable labels or sections within the fair.
Nicola Ricciardi
The presence of some Milanese galleries, especially recent ones, stands out. Ricciardi says: “Milan’s galleries represent the backbone of Miart, it is undeniable that without their support the fair itself would not exist. This applies both to historical entities, those that ten years ago all together decided to believe in and invest in the city's fair - I'm thinking of kaufmann repetto, Giò Marconi, Raffaella Cortese - and to more recent entities, those that have grown with me in the difficult post-Covid years. An example is Martina Simeti, who, after three years within the Emergent category, this year decided to take the leap and participate in the Established category. Or like those other galleries I expect to follow the same upward trajectory in the coming editions, such as ArtNoble, Eastcontemporary, Federico Valvassori.”
The fact remains that the 2024 edition of Miart, sponsored by Intesa Sanpaolo, boasts truly remarkable numbers of participants: 178 galleries from 28 countries, an estimated double-digit increase compared to the 2023 edition. In addition to “Established,” there’s a new “Portal” category, a new section hosting galleries that propose small exhibitions designed to discover or rediscover universes and artistic practices seemingly incredibly distant. Among the names are Anna Boghiguian (Galleria Franco Noero) - whose latest exhibition in Turin was unforgettable - and the Congolese collective Catpc (Kow). Many acquisition opportunities for participating artists and galleries lie ahead thanks to ten awards.
In the city, the art week, a widespread event coordinated by the Municipality of Milan in collaboration with Miart, offers a rich panorama of accessory events. So, Milan, with all its peculiarities, becomes once again a privileged place for exploring and investing in contemporary languages: the eagerly awaited solo exhibition of an artist dear to Domus, Alessandro Mendini - an eclectic and polymorphic figure poised between art and architecture -, the major exhibition of Nari Ward at Hangar Bicocca, and other less conventional and more experimental proposals, both independent and not.
Opening image: Adrian Piper, Das Ding-an-sich bin ich, 2018. Photo Andreas FranzXaver Süß © APRA Foundation Berlin.
In recent years, it has been difficult not to include the programming of the Padiglione d’arte Contemporanea within the art week guide. Although the exhibition opened last month, it deserves all the necessary attention; especially as it is one of the rare - and unprecedented - proposals of a profoundly political art on gender and anti-racist issues. It’s one of the few, very few, proposals by female artists in the Milan’s art lineup.
The museum, under the guidance of curator Diego Sileo, is moving with extreme clarity through nations, continents, themes, and personalities that have made the history of the late 20th century and of the present, and still underrepresented in Italy at the exhibition level.
Like in an edulcorated "treasure hunt," seventy works by artists active in Italy, ranging from esteemed masters to emerging talents, will fill Milan’s streets in the form of artist posters. This nre public art project, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and promoted by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, unfolds over two weeks starting April 8th.
Throughout the city’s neighborhoods, from the Monumental Cemetery to the Historic Center, from City Life to Porta Romana, passersby will chance upon these fortuitous surprises, featuring renowned artists like Paola Pivi, Yuri Ancarani, Giulio Paolini, Maurizio Cattelan, Adelita Husni Bey, and Sislej Xhafa, alongside emerging luminaries such as Diego Marcon, Giulia Cenci, Jacopo Miliani, Binta Diaz, and Guglielmo Castelli, among others. It's a sequel, an enlarged homage, to the 2004 “The New Monsters” exhibition.
If you still don’t know BiM, Bicocca Meets Milan (Bicocca Meets Milan) - an urban regeneration initiative in the Bicocca district, transforming an iconic building designed by Vittorio Gregotti into an avant-garde work destination - Miart is the ideal opportunity to explore it.
Situated on Viale dell’Innovazione, BiM’s sixth floor will host over twenty captivating works by David Horvitz starting April 13th. This site-specific project, meticulously crafted by the acclaimed Californian conceptual artist, whose works have been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the New Museum in New York.
Titled “Abbandonare il locale” (Abandoning the Locale,) the exhibition evokes Horvitz’s renowned project, “The Disappearing Piece,” a work of thoughtful staging of his own disappearance that retraces almost twenty years of his artistic research, alternating between photographs, performances, mail art, and books, with a special focus on digital means.
The collective exhibition “To Romanticize with Indecision” is an unusual project at the Cassina Projects gallery, curated by two artists born in the 1980s and 1990s, Monia Ben Hamouda and Michele Gabriele, who have invited other artists to exhibit together with them in the spacious and bright spaces in Via Mecenate.
They are all foreigners, linked by a “relationship of genuine mutual esteem:” Andrew Birk, Anne de Vries, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, and Bradford Kessler. “Perhaps the essence moving the whole project is that the exhibition wants to be a sort of call to the right to contradiction or, in other words, to the right to having doubts within artistic research.”
It rarely happens to see an artist at work. The solo exhibition of the painter Andrea Kvas seems to be a response to this topic. “A New Golden Age of Guano” is a devouring site-specific installation, created by Kvas at the Studio Giovanni de Francesco in Milan and organized by Spazio Morris.
For seven days, Kvas will create the installation in a sort of action painting. The work will merge with the space, becoming more intense, oversized, and immersive with each passing day, taking on an environmental nature. In the days before April 6th, the public will be able to freely witness the development of the artwork.