10 unmissable art exhibitions in Italy in May

One cannot begin a journey through exhibitions in Italy without starting with the art exhibition par excellence: the Venice Biennale.

That is the oldest visual arts exhibition of international scope in Italy, held for the first time in 1895. From that year on a biennial basis are celebrated the visual arts and not only, since 1980 the kermesse, in fact, moves the eye on architecture, alternating with it.Recently it has been enriched with specific appointments dedicated to dance, cinema, music, and theater.

This year the great exhibition is curated by Cecilia Alemani, already the artistic director of prestigious cultural institutions both in Italy and abroad, and great expectations are on the next edition, postponed in 2020 for the covid emergency. A visit is a must!

The master of color and exaltation luminosities are on display in Milan in a specific excursus of paintings on the theme of women and their image in the sixteenth century. 

An exhibition path articulated on 47 paintings, where Tiziano Vecellio is accompanied by some of his contemporaries such as Giorgione, Lotto, Palma il Vecchio, Veronese, and Tintoretto. Some of these masterpieces are prestigious loans from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. 

The female image is thus repurposed across a broad spectrum of possible themes, while at the same time comparing the individual artistic approaches of Titian and other painters of the time.

A successful experiment, that impossible dream (or almost) to reunite the three sculptures with the theme of the Pietà in a single place as if it were a temple dedicated to the genius of the world sculpture Michelangelo Buonarroti.

On the occasion of the end of the restoration works of the Pietà Bandini (kept in Florence), it will be possible to admire the renewed work of Michelangelo together with two very important casts of the Pietà Vaticana (Rome, Basilica of San Pietro) and the Pietà Rondanini (Milan, Museums of Castello Sforzesco) coming from the Vatican collections. A sight not to be missed for all lovers of Renaissance art.

In addition to the great International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the city hosts in the historic Gallerie dell'Accademia a monographic exhibition on the great Indian sculptor and artist, universally recognized and appreciated, Anish Kapoor.

The show intends to retrace the key moments of the artist's career and his relationship with Italy, focusing on the enormous amount of work he has done, which will be flanked by a new body of unpublished works.

The great contemporary art exhibitions in Italy often pass through the extraordinary Hangar Bicocca.

This spring Hangar Bicocca celebrates one of the most important contemporary filmmakers, Steve McQueen, who today strongly influences the world of visual arts and cinema itself, thanks to his way of using and exhibiting the film medium.

The result is an exhibition relevant to the historical period in which we are living with the artist's sharp gaze on the human condition, fragile and often dramatic.

For the entire spring period until the end of June, great international photography will be on stage in Turin, with masterpieces from the Thomas Walther collection of the MoMa in New York.

A selection of 230 photographic works from the first half of the twentieth century, true masterpieces of the history of photography with works by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Karl Blossfeldt, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Marianne Breslauer, Claude Cahun, Lore Feininger, Florence Henri, Irene Hoffmann, Lotte Jocobi, Lee Miller, Tina Modotti, Germaine Krull, Lucia Moholy, Leni Riefenstahl and many others.

We are in Procida. The smallest island of the Gulf of Naples becomes a promoter of Italian culture and in spring will intensify its program of exhibitions concerning different historical periods, from ancient to contemporary.

In the month of May, the sixteenth-century Palazzo d'Avalos will host "SprigionARTI" with a great contemporary art exhibition with site-specific works by Jan Fabre, Andrea Anastasio, Francesco Arena, Foma Fantasma curated by Vincenzo De Bellis and Agostino Riitano.

A unique opportunity to visit a small (but great) reality today in the limelight. 

A major exhibition on the Parisian master of Impressionism started in February 2022 but can be visited until May 22, 2022. We are talking about well over 50 paintings of the French artist, highly celebrated by the public and the critics for his brilliant palette and the particular pictorial rendering, now told through a unique exhibition.

There will be several works relating to his time living in Giverny, a small town in Normandy on the banks of the Seine.

This show event is already in the history of exhibitions in Italy for being the largest exhibition ever held on Donatello, the father of Renaissance sculpture. 

An unrepeatable event that will reconstruct the life and art of one of the influential masters of Italian art of all time. Alongside, there will also be masterpieces by artists of the caliber of Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Not to be missed! 

This exhibition was born of the collaboration between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Barberini Museum in Potsdam. It addresses the never-before-examined themes of magic, esotericism, the occult, and myth within the avant-garde current of Surrealism.

Several masterpieces on display including the famous "Dressing of the Bride" by Max Ernst, other artists present will be: Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Maya Deren, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, René Magritte, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning and many others, with works from prestigious collections.