21.12.2023

Not to be missed

Exhibiting year 2023

The art programming in 2023 was truly impressive: from Renaissance art to contemporary art, from archaeology to photography, it is worth remembering the best of the past year's art offerings and catching the exhibitions still in progress.

A year full of renewed exhibitions set up 2023, so we thought we would briefly run through the best museum events curated in Italy and abroad.

Old masters exhibitions

The year 2023 will be remembered as the year of Perugino. This past spring, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia celebrated him with the major exhibition, Perugino in his time. The fortunate audiences who were able to visit this monographic exhibition, and the various displays curated in conjunction with the event, will not easily forget the splendor of the paintings of the great Renaissance master, Raphael's teacher. 

Making her mark is the 2023 exhibition that has been called a "must-see" by Vogue and a "sure-to-be-historic show" by The New York Times. Staged at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the exhibition traces the history of women artists in Europe between 1400 and 1800. Often overlooked or passed over in the background, the role of the woman artist regains its fascinating dignity through more than two hundred masterpieces in various materials and artistic fields.

There is still time to visit the exhibition Moroni (1521-1580), the portrait of his time in Milan at the Gallerie d'Italia, which aims to celebrate the artist from Bergamo, among the greatest interpreters of Lombard Renaissance painting. The author of significant devotional works, featured in the exhibition, Moroni is, however, best known for his innovative work as a portrait painter. Excellent, in our opinion, is the arrangement of the more than seventy works on display. 

Worth the trip to MART in Rovereto, on the other hand, is the solo exhibition dedicated to the extremely rich collection of Edoardo Sperone, born in 1939, where one can admire works collected by the famous art dealer ranging "...from ancient Rome and ancient China, to the day before yesterday". The man without qualities. Gian Enzo Sperone collector, highlights the importance of collecting in the last century by inviting new and longtime art lovers to explore more and more areas of art.

 

Modern Art exhibitions

In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930 is the Apollo Award 2023-winning exhibition organized by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid at the turn of 2022. Featuring some 50 paintings that left Kiev shortly before the November bombing, as well as loans from around the world, this exhibition highlighted the distinctiveness of Ukrainian art and culture in the early 20th century, while emphasizing the Ukrainian identity of artists identified as "Russian" when their works began to be known in the West.

Marcel Duchamp is the centerpiece of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which will close the 2023 program on a high note: a tribute to Duchamp, among the most influential and eclectic artists of the 20th century as well as friend and advisor to American patron Peggy Guggenheim. With the Boîte-en-valise, a masterpiece now part of the Venetian museum, at its center, the display also includes important loans from prestigious Italian and American museums and several private collections.

On the occasion of the artist's 75th birthday, Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie presented the exhibition Isa Genzken: 75/75. 75 sculptures of all scales in Mies van der Rohe's recently restored glass structure-a fitting setting for Genzken's complex commentaries on modernism and its consequences. His tendency to make everyday objects (radios, toys, newspapers) strange was accentuated by a display that recalled the careful arrangement of antiquities in the museum's upper room.

It is called Dali, Magritte, Man Ray and Surrealism. Masterpieces from the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the exhibition that this summer put the sacred monsters of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum's renowned collection of surrealist art in dialogue with some highlights from Mudec's permanent collection, dedicated to non-European civilizations. It was a way for the Museum of Cultures in Milan to be discovered through 180 works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, documents and artifacts of this revolutionary artistic current.

 

New layouts:

Unveiled to the public in 2023, the remounting operation Look Again: European Paintings 1300-1800 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a highlight of the year that will remain open for viewing for many years to come. Costing more than $150 million, the refitting is not a true exhibition, but rather a long-term project that can be admired for many years to come. In fact, for five years curators at the renowned New York museum have been working on not only a chronological rearrangement, but also to refit the lighting.

By contrast, three years of closure are due for the renovation and redevelopment project at London's National Portrait Gallery, which opened in the presence of the Princess of Wales, Kate Middlenton, godmother of the London museum. The new Blavatnik Wing now houses more than 100 years of history through portraits of British figures displayed in nine galleries-from Charles Darwin to writers Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, the Brontë sisters, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to name a few. Enjoy the tour!