18a Quadriennale D’arte. Fantastica

Art is the mirror in which every age looks at itself in order to know itself—and, in not recognizing itself, begins to think.
— Octavio Paz

With a major collective project, Fantastica narrates art in Italy over the first twenty-five years of the 21st century through five interpretive paths, each defined by its curator. The exhibition unfolds throughout the ground floor of Palazzo Esposizioni in a continuous sequence of thematic and spatial investigations.

(My Image Is That by Which I Let Myself Be Represented: The Self-Portrait)
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero

The theme here is self-representation: the act of choosing how—and through what—we are portrayed. The focus is not the myth of Narcissus, but Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, where the mirror ceases to be a physical object reflecting an image and becomes instead a threshold between two communicating worlds.

(Full Memory. A Room of One’s Own)
Curated by Francesco Bonami

For Bonami, the defining concepts of the generation in question are independence and autonomy. Each artist affirms an individual identity in dialogue with many others, yet without any need for belonging to groups or movements.
A Room of One’s Own—from Virginia Woolf’s celebrated essay—serves both as manifesto and as the spatial principle of his section.

(The Time of Images. Images Out of Control?)
Curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera

This section focuses on photography and its use in contemporary art, exploring how the medium has evolved from representation to revelation. The meaning and value of photography are in constant transformation, opening new and ingenious possibilities for expression.

(Untitled)
Curated by Francesco Stocchi

Stocchi’s section, deliberately without a title, highlights the act of creation itself. It establishes a collective model of procedural autonomy that restores centrality to the artist—not only in producing the work, but in conceiving the very space designed to host and engage the public.

(The Unfinished Body)
Curated by Alessandra Troncone

This section explores contemporary narratives of the human and non-human body, drawing from myth, science, and social transformation. The works on view propose layered and composite visions that reflect the body’s continual becoming—its openness, hybridity, and permeability to change.

The realization of the 18th Quadriennale d’arte relied on a budget of €2.6 million, of which 44% came from the institution’s own funds, 40% from a special contribution by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, and 16% from private sponsors.

Intesa Sanpaolo confirms its role as Main Partner of the exhibition, in line with the Group’s cultural development programs, both as supporter of numerous cultural initiatives and through its strategic platform Progetto Cultura, centered on the activities of the Gallerie d’Italia—the bank’s four museum venues in Milan, Naples, Turin, and Vicenza.

The official sponsor of the exhibition is Enel.
Fondazione Roma is Cultural Partner and patron committed to promoting the work of contemporary artists. It specifically supports both the Quadriennale Prize and the Young Art Prize of the exhibition.
The main Technical Partner is Dresswall, designer and producer of the system of veils that link the various exhibition sections.
The lighting design has been realized in collaboration with ILTI Luce, part of the Nemo Group, which contributed to the exhibition’s lighting concept.

(Food, Cats, the Gym, Myself, Travels, and Various Trinkets)
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero

“Every portrait is a self-portrait: the artist paints himself even when he believes he is escaping.”
 — Oscar Wilde

The self-portrait, here, is both a pretext and an enigma. The author reveals himself through what he does, yet remains outside himself. Thirteen artists, spanning three generations, trace a path that moves between recto and verso—like the double-sided panels that open the exhibition, inspired by a rare and private work by Lucio Fontana. “I am a saint,” reads the front; “I am a scoundrel,” the back.

The first gallery opens with a direct confrontation between gesture and identity, frontal view and hidden side, initiating a reflection on the artwork as a space in which the artist takes a stand—or withdraws. From there unfolds a sequence of works, many newly created, presenting contemporary Italian painting in its variety and contrasts, moving through the loquacity and ambiguity of the pictorial language until it silently crosses the threshold of the work through which the artist allows himself to be represented.

The middle room exposes us to the mystery of concept and musical composition. Before the end, an unexpected passage opens a “crack,” preparing us for a final vision where time seems to suspend, and the gaze becomes long, silent, and continuous. A subtle dialogue emerges between subjectivities—sometimes polymorphous, opposing, or contradictory—sharing with the public a vision of their own practice as something that defines itself over time, through differences of gesture, matter, and thought.

It is an artistic process that crosses the shifting territories of representation and identity. Ultimately, these rooms are not seeking a reflection but a quieter breath—the possibility of truly seeing, even beyond oneself.

Participating artists
Paolo Bini, Gianni Caravaggio, Siro Cugusi, Roberto De Pinto, Donato Dozzy, Matteo Fato, Emilio Gola, Luisa Lambri, Luca Marignoni, Roberta Orio, Runo B, Marta Spagnoli, Vedovamazzei.

“I do not represent myself—I question myself: the painting is the question that never ceases to look at me.”
 — Francis Bacon

Curated by Francesco Bonami

“To be free is to possess an inner room that no one can invade.”
 — Virginia Woolf

I chose not to impose a theme that would unify the artists selected, except for that of independence and autonomy. The public has the pleasure and the task—but not the obligation—to discover real or imagined connections among the artists, or perhaps to find none at all, confirming each one’s autonomy or insularity.

I chose artists I had never previously worked with, who had never participated in the Quadriennale, were under fifty, and alive. There is no common thread or apparent elective affinity among them. Yet in all of them emerges the same necessity to define what Virginia Woolf sought: an invisible but wholly personal room, a world within innumerable other worlds, a story interwoven with countless others.

Each in their own way attempts to disconnect from an ever-connected reality, eternally informed yet constantly emptied of the intimacy needed to build or dismantle one’s present identity. Each of them, in their own way, seems to say: “Here I am.” Where “I” is not domination, but synthesis—beyond gender, ethnicity, nationality, or social class. “I, like you, am I.”

Recognizing ourselves as simple and autonomous “I”s, we learn to respect all the “I”s that others are. Ubuntu!—in the Bantu language, “I am because you are.”

Participating artists
Friedrich Andreoni, Lupo Borgonovo, Roberto Cattivelli, Giulia Cenci, Cecilia De Nisco, Luca Gioacchino Di Bernardo, Chiara Enzo, Emiliano Furia, Jem Perucchini, Beatrice Scaccia, Lorenzo Vitturi, Shafei Xia.

“Only those who can dwell in solitude can inhabit the world truthfully.”
 — Rainer Maria Rilke

Curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera

“We live under the empire of the image, but the most powerful image is the one that does not show itself.”
 — Jean Baudrillard

How does art react to the flood of photos, selfies, memes, screenshots, gifs, reels, and stories that overwhelm our vision?
 This section focuses on the role of images and the evolution of photography in Italy from 2000 to 2025. Eleven artists from different generations demonstrate the versatility of the photographic medium and explore the value and responsibility of images.

To what extent can we trust what we see? Why are we so dependent on images that are now less to be viewed than to be lived and shared as “social gestures”? The exhibition proposes a pause in this uncontrollable flow: here, works do not reproduce but seek to reveal.

Photography moves away from its representational liturgy and enters into dialogue with other languages, transcending the boundaries of the frame to unveil its most authentic and hidden meaning. The section explores photography’s enduring power to make the invisible visible and to prompt reflection on what lies behind images rather than merely observing them.

Participating artists
Eleonora Agostini, Jacopo Benassi, Andrea Camiolo, Irene Fenara, Linda Fregni Nagler, Teresa Giannico, Massimo Grimaldi, Francesco Jodice, Giovanni Ozzola, Giulia Parlato, Davide Tranchina.

“To photograph is not to stop time, but to open it.”
 — Hiroshi Sugimoto

Curated by Francesco Stocchi

“A title is a cage: the true work does not allow itself to be named.”
 — Maurice Blanchot

A deliberately untitled exhibition, openly devoid of the thematic structure that usually defines collective shows—its goal is not to illustrate or elaborate a concept, but to embody a creative act.

At a time of widespread reflection on the roles and responsibilities cultural institutions are called to assume, the invitation to reflect on Italian art of the first quarter of the century has revealed a need to revisit the paradigms consolidated in recent decades through a tautological exhibition—an exhibition constituted in the very act of its becoming.

In a cultural landscape long devoid of authentic artistic movements—marked on one side by the rigid specialization of professional roles and on the other by a drive toward contamination between art and the cultural industries—there is a will to restore to the artist a greater operational autonomy, envisioning them as the sole agent of the exhibition practice.

The entire project stems from a shared and self-managed process, aimed at eliminating intermediations by involving artists in an unprecedented exercise: to imagine, develop, and oversee every phase—from installation to lighting, communication, and the language adopted—in direct dialogue with the concrete challenges and opportunities of exhibition making.

Meeting on several occasions, artists and curator engaged in an open, extended debate, starting from the fundamental principles of exhibition-making and challenging long-established conventions in favor of a broader view of contemporary creation.

The artists have therefore not merely presented their works, but contributed to an exhibition that is both work and process.

Participating artists
Micol Assaël, Luca Bertolo, Adelaide Cioni, Martino Gamper, Valerio Nicolai, Lulù Nuti, Pietro Roccasalva, Arcangelo Sassolino, Alessandro Sciarroni.

“Every exhibition is an experiment in freedom: art does not illustrate—it happens.”
 — John Cage

Curated by Alessandra Troncone

“The body is not a limit, but a question life poses to itself.”
 — Maurice Merleau-Ponty

This section presents artists who engage with the possible narratives of the contemporary body, in an extended sense that includes both human and non-human forms. Torn between its embodied, material, tangible dimension and its existence as “code,” the body appears as a subject in continual transformation.

The title evokes incompleteness not as imperfection but as a permanent state of becoming, emphasizing openness and permeability—new ways of relating to the other and to alterity.

Taking as a conceptual starting point the scientific progress of recent decades, especially in genetics, and considering phenomena of mutation and hybridization, The Unfinished Body asks to what extent biological heritage defines what we are.

Interweaving myths of the past and futuristic visions, the section opens to the imaginative power of art in dreaming what we might become, through the eyes of artists participating for the first time in the Quadriennale d’arte.

Participating artists
Camilla Alberti, Diego Cibelli, Antonio Della Guardia, Federica Di Pietrantonio, Valentina Furian, Iva Lulashi, Roberto Pugliese, Agnes Questionmark, Emilio Vavarella.

“We are works in progress: every metamorphosis is a way of staying alive.”
 — Donna Haraway

There will be three performances by three different artists that, during the 18th Quadriennale d’Arte, will animate specific sections of the exhibition.
 In the context of the exhibition curated by Alessandra Troncone, Antonio Della Guardia presents a performative action taking place on the right-hand internal staircase, where the body becomes both threshold and instrument of narration, in an open dialogue with the architectural space.
“Il tempo delle immagini” (The Time of Images), curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, hosts instead the intervention by Davide Tranchina: an intimate performance of about twenty minutes, reflecting on the act of seeing and on the ambiguity of reality.
Finally, in the section curated by Francesco Stocchi, Alessandro Sciarroni presents two distinct performances, each lasting about 20–30 minutes, in which movement and repetition become tools of poetic resistance, opening new possibilities of relation between performer, spectators, and exhibition space.

The Young and the Masters: The 1935 Quadriennale
Curated by Walter Guadagnini

1,761 works by more than 700 artists divided into 62 rooms, 19 of which dedicated to solo exhibitions; 36 prizes awarded for a total of 500,000 lire; 446 works sold, for a total of 1,042,000 lire (often purchased by public institutions); more than 300,000 visitors; a 257-page catalogue printed in 4,000 copies.
 These are some of the remarkable figures relating to the Second National Quadriennale d’Arte, held from February 5 to July 31, 1935, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, freed in record time from the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution that had occupied its spaces for two years.
Honorary President was Giuseppe Bottai, a leading figure of the regime; actual President Enrico di San Martino Valperga; Secretary General—and essentially deus ex machina of the event—Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Roman, painter, critic, deputy, and former secretary of the Artists’ Union, without doubt one of the most influential figures in Italian art of those decades.

As can be understood from the figures and the names, this edition of the Quadriennale was not an ordinary one: it was the successful attempt to present to the public not only the best of Italian art at that moment, but also the variety of expressions and tendencies present across the entire national territory.
 Within this framework, however, it is easy to recognize some distinctive elements that can be traced back to Oppo’s specific intentions, which this concise contemporary homage has also tried to reflect.

First of all, the comparison between the generation of the masters (Severini, de Chirico, Martini, Morandi, to name only the most famous) and the younger ones; the considerable presence of representatives of the first and especially the second Futurist period, who also formed the group most inclined to propose an art with explicit propagandistic features; the emphasis placed on the representatives of the Roman tonalismo and the limited presence of exponents of the Novecento movement (disliked by Oppo) on one side, and of the abstractionists—especially those from Milan—on the other, little appreciated by the artistic establishment.

In any case, it was an edition that entered history—as also testified by the archival documentation on display, an integral part of the exhibition—of which in these rooms we can see some reflections, entrusted to extraordinary works, some practically unpublished, that testify to a complex period yet rich in artists who have marked the history of 20th-century Italian art.

Artists in the exhibition
Luigi Bartolini, Mario Broglio, Corrado Cagli, Cagnaccio di San Pietro, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Emanuele Cavalli, Gisberto Ceracchini, Giovanni Colacicchi, Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, Antonio Donghi, Pericle Fazzini, Leonor Fini, Carlo Levi, Osvaldo Licini, Mario Mafai, Marino Marini, Arturo Martini, Giorgio Morandi, Milena Pavlović Barilli, Fausto Pirandello, Enrico Prampolini, Regina, Giovanni Romagnoli, Scipione, Gino Severini, Mario Sironi, Luigi Trifoglio, Gianfilippo Usellini, Farpi Vignoli, Alberto Ziveri.

Fantastica. 18th Quadriennale d’Arte also includes access to the exhibition
The Young and the Masters: The 1935 Quadriennale

Palazzo Esposizioni Roma
Via Nazionale 194
11 October 2025 – 18 January 2026

Tickets
The ticket for Fantastica. 18th Quadriennale d’Arte also grants access to the exhibition
The Young and the Masters: The 1935 Quadriennale.
Tickets can be purchased online: www.palazzoesposizioni.it