10 exhibition to visit in February 2025 because they’re closing soon

With new and “remixed” works, Marcello Maloberti celebrates his connection with the city of Milan in the PAC spaces. More than a retrospective, the Metal Panic exhibition is a new project that reflects the synthesis of the artist's work and the different dimensions he has explored over the years, from installations to performance. Curated by Diego Sileo, the exhibition will be open to the public until February 9, and will close with the performance “Baciamano” (2025) featuring actor Ninetto Davoli on the last weekend of the exhibition.

Milan honors Enrico Baj with a major retrospective at the Palazzo Reale, in the Sala delle Cariatidi, one hundred years after the artist's birth. Curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj, the exhibition brings together fifty works tracing his long career, from the early 1950s to the 2000s. For the first time, the work “I Funerali dell'anarchico Pinelli” (1972) will be integrated into an anthological itinerary, creating a dialogue with other works by the master of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde.

Curated by Andrea Viliani with Vittoria Pavesi, “«I just don't like eggs!» Andrea Fraser on collectors, collecting, collections” is the first solo exhibition dedicated by an Italian institution to the research of artist, writer and thinker Andrea Fraser. The curatorial discourse analyzes Fraser's works on collecting and the art market, and her contribution to Institutional Critique. With works from the 1980s to the present, the figure of the collector, the dynamics of the art market, and the intersections between public and private collections are investigated, emphasizing their expressive and sometimes contradictory instances.

The stunning Palazzo Altemps, designed in the 1570s by Melozzo da Forlì, until February 23, 2025 hosts the exhibition “Gabriele Basilico. Rome”, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity with the National Roman Museum, MUFOCO and the Basilico Archive, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Milanese photographer's birth. Curated by Matteo Balduzzi and Giovanna Calvenzi, the exhibition presents more than fifty works that explore the link between Basilico and the capital through photographs of twenty professional assignments carried out between 1985 and 2011, giving evidence to his gaze on the city.

Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke explores Britain's imperial past in a groundbreaking exhibition at the British Museum. Through objects from the collection and new works, Locke interrogates the complex relationships between museums and colonialism, focusing on Britain's historical interactions with Africa, India and the Caribbean. Among the works on view are “The Watchers” (2024), anthropomorphic sculptures that watch visitors, opening a dialogue about history, identity and cultural appropriation.

Through February 9, Tate Modern is hosting the first major British retrospective of Mike Kelley (1954-2012), an artist who explored media, pop culture and philosophy to challenge social structures. The exhibition – which revolves around an unrealized work on ghosts and identity entitled “Under a Sheet/Existance Problems” – traces his entire career, from his revolutionary “craft” sculptures, made from textiles, stuffed animals and objects of the ordinary, to multimedia installations such as “Day Is Done” (2005-2006), through such well-known works as “The Poltergeist” (1979) and “Kandors series” (1999-2011).

The four stories of the Frank Gehry-designed building house the works of American artist Tom Wesselmann, in dialogue with other Pop Art artists, to celebrate the movement that radically revolutionized art in the 1950s and 1960s. Immersed in the Pop era, Wesselmann embraced the aesthetic vocabulary of his time, mixing advertising language, and classic subjects of painting such as still lifes, nudes and landscapes, expanding their expressive possibilities. The exhibition traces his career, developing a comparison with other Pop Art icons such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons, to new interpretations by contemporary artists.

Kunsthaus Zürich presents the first major retrospective of Marina Abramović in Switzerland, spanning the entire career of one of the world's most important contemporary artists. In addition to seminal pieces of her work and re-enacted performances such as “Imponderabilia” (1977) and “Luminosity” (1997), in Zurich Abramović presents a new site-specific performance piece, “Decompression Chamber” (2024). It consists of a room, with lounge chairs facing outward, in which visitors are invited to wear noise-canceling headphones to indulge in a moment of “decompression.”

The exhibition “Fluxus and Beyond: Ursula Burghardt, Benjamin Patterson” at Museum Ludwig explores Fluxus through two artists on the fringes of the movement: Ursula Burghardt and Benjamin Patterson. Active in Cologne's vibrant art scene in the 1960s, they met in Mary Bauermeister's studio at the beginning of the decade. The exhibition examines the beginnings of Fluxus in the German city, with references to the Paris and New York scenes, in the postwar historical context, following the evolution of the two artists, with a special focus on Patterson's musical production and his return to art in 1988 after a 22-year hiatus.

An artist and art theorist, Medardo Rosso was a pioneer of modernism, known for his anti-heroic and experimental approach to sculpture, with which he challenged traditional conventions. Vienna's Mumok devotes a retrospective to him with more than fifty sculptures, photographs, collages and drawings, delving into his experimental and creative method. The exhibition also features works by twentieth-century artists who were in some way influenced by Medardo Rosso's work, from Bacon to Warhol, creating a dialogue with his revolutionary art, and in keeping with Rosso's artistic practice, which often involved not exhibiting alone, but in “conversation” with others.