Exhibitions that have just opened and are worth a visit

Thirty years of career traced through more than two hundred photographic works and ten video-installations that have become part of the world's most important museum collections, from the Whitney Museum to the Tate Modern: the PAC in Milan hosts a major retrospective of the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat (1957, Qazvin), curated by Diego Sileo and Beatrice Benedetti. From the early 1990s with the photographic series “Women of Allah” - iconic female portraits marked by poetic calligraphy - to the video-installation “The Fury” (2022), Shirin Neshat from the dualism of man-woman, explores the deep tensions between identity and exile, individual and collectivity, questioning issues of power, religion, race and the relationships between past and present.

Drawing as a medium that chronicles changes in architecture over time. "Stop Drawing. Architettura oltre il disegno," curated by Pippo Ciorra at MAXXI in Rome through September 21, explores the evolution of architecture through the transformations of its essential tool. Not just paper, pencils and crayons: today, digital simulations, artistic and participatory practices flank - sometimes replacing - traditional drawing. On display are works by authors of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Carlo Scarpa to Aldo Rossi, for whom drawing was synonymous with identity in architecture, to Gordon Matta-Clark and Frank Gehry, who have enriched the vocabulary of architecture with new languages, from video to collage to performance.

Through July 21, the Fondazione Donnaregina - Museo Madre presents "Euphoria. Tomaso Binga," the largest retrospective ever dedicated to the Salerno artist. Curated by Eva Fabbris with Daria Kahn and staged by Rio Grande, the exhibition brings together more than one hundred and twenty works including visual poems, collages, installations and performances. The title reflects the ironic and feminist spirit of Binga, a male pseudonym chosen by Bianca Pucciarelli Menna (Salerno, 1931) to denounce gender privileges in art. The exhibition, the result of two years of research and collaboration with the artist, is divided into eighteen rooms to celebrate a vision that combines word, body and social denunciation in a verbo-visual practice that is free, desecrating and political.

More than seventy years after the exhibition “Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Fondazione Ragghianti presents "Made in Italy. Destination America 1945-1954," with the aim of recounting the overseas expansion of Made in Italy after World War II through works of art, design, fashion and craftsmanship. Curated by Paola Cordera and Davide Turrini, the exhibition presents numerous masterpieces that symbolize Italian style in the 20th century: from Venini glassware, to ceramics by Gio Ponti and Lucio Fontana, to footwear designed by Salvatore Ferragamo.

A visit to the Labirinto della Masone in spring is always a great idea for an out-of-town trip, and the current exhibition through July 13 in this magical place conceived by Franco Maria Ricci is one more reason to discover it: "From Serafini to Luigi. L'uovo, lo scheletro, l'arcobaleno" is a journey into the multifaceted universe of artist-architect Luigi Serafini (Rome, 1949). From the famous Codex Seraphinianus, published in 1981 by Franco Maria Ricci himself, to the roots of his imagination, with unpublished works and personal memories. Symbolically divided into three sections - skeleton, egg, rainbow - the exhibition interweaves art, architecture, travel and poetry, culminating in the Domus Seraphiniana, now in danger of being dismantled.

In spring 2025, Fondation Louis Vuitton dedicates a massive retrospective to David Hockney (Bradford, 1937), with more than four hundred works from 1955 to 2025. Painting, drawing, and immersive installations chronicle more than seven decades of his career. The focus is on works from the last twenty-five years, spent between Yorkshire, Normandy, and London, featuring landscapes, portraits, and digital natures. Among works on view are the famous “pool paintings,” portraits on iPads, an installation inspired by Hockney's passion for opera, and more recent work influenced by Edvard Munch and William Blake.

Born in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, Ali Cherri (Beirut, 1976) reflects on the violence generated by political conflicts and how it imprints marks on bodies, landscapes and historical narratives. “How I Am Monument” explores history through matter: mud sculptures inspired by archaeological finds merge with ancient objects to create hybrid beings. Mud as a symbol of creation and memory becomes an accompanying element of videos and installations in which the effects of military discipline and trauma on humans and nature are explored. The most recent works in the exhibition investigate the language of monuments, as in “Sphinx” (2024) and “Toppled Monuments,” which evoke empty plinths and invite a rethinking of the past. The exhibition hosted by the Baltic Centre is the Lebanese artist's first major retrospective in the UK.

For the past two decades, Ed Atkins has been a major player in the digital art scene, with complex, disturbing, at times ironic video works that often leave the viewer feeling disoriented. This major solo exhibition at London's Tate Modern, spanning his entire career, presents videos, writings, paintings, embroideries and drawings, in a confrontation between digital immateriality and physical reality, to explore themes such as intimacy, love and death, using the artist's body and experience as tools.

The exhibition launching the Guggenheim Bilbao's Film & Video 2025 program tells the story of the artistic bond and friendship between Vito Acconci (1940-2017) and contemporary artist Sergio Prego (Donostia-San Sebastián, 1969), who joined the Acconci Studio in the final years of Acconci's own career. Produced in collaboration with the archives of Electronic Arts Intermix (Eai) in New York, the exhibition offers a subjective reading of Acconci's video works and performances through the installation designed by Prego, aimed at exploring the tensions between body, media and architecture.

Five central players in the art, music and dance of the post-World War II era: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly. Their deep connection gave rise to contaminations and collaborations that the exhibition at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich chronicles through more than 180 works – enhanced by archival materials and stage sets –  for the first time presented in their original context, alongside iconic masterpieces and artworks that

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Liberation from Nazi-Fascism, the Unione Comuni della Bassa Romagna (Union of Municipalities of Lower Romagna) presents the exhibition “fa che sia un racconto,” a deep focus on the conflict between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, which began on October 7, 2023. It features forty large-format photographs by photojournalist Lorenzo Tugnoli, Italy's only Pulitzer Prize winner in 2019, curated by Francesca Recchia, researcher and writer interested in the geopolitical dimension of cultural processes. The title of the exhibition, verses from a poem by Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet and intellectual who was killed in Gaza in December 2023, introduces the exhibition itinerary as a warning to not forget, but it is also an invitation to witness history, even when it happens far from our eyes.