Milan is not just the Salone del Mobile: exhibitions to see in the city

Until Sunday June 12, Milan is buzzing with the Salone del Mobile, but the city has much more to offer.

Here are five exhibitions worth visiting.

The Beginning of Time. The Spatial Researches of Arnaldo Pomodoro from March 6 to December 18, 2022 at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation

The Beginning of Time. The Spatial Researches by Arnaldo Pomodoro is currently ongoing at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation until December 18. 

The exhibition launches the series of Open Studio: temporary installations in the spaces of the Studio of Arnaldo Pomodoro that delve into the lesser-known periods of the artist’s research, showcasing original works, documents, and archival materials.

The exhibition showcases the work The Beginning of Time n. 2, a large bas-relief in lead, zinc, and tin. Here Pomodoro, who has already surpassed the phase of informal, explores the spatial development of a concrete and substantial surface.

Also on display are sculptures, drawings, and design studies that narrate the period of activity between 1957 and 1964, culminating in the creation of the Great Tribute to technological civilization for the facade of the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne.

In the Great Tribute, Pomodoro brings to sculpture, on the vast surface of concrete and bronze, a puncturing of touches, hollows, knots, traces, and imprints: an unreadable language, rich in history, almost symbolic and at the same time prophetic of the circuits of the first “electronic brains”.

Metaspore, Anicka Yi from February 24 to July 24, 2022 at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca

“Metaspore” is the solo exhibition of Anicka Yi, currently on at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca until July 24, 2022. The exhibition is curated by Fiammetta Griccioli and Vicente Todolí. 

Anicka Yi is a contemporary artist of Korean descent, born in Seoul in 1971 but has been living and working in New York for years. 

She has established herself as one of the most innovative and interesting figures in the contemporary scene. Yi tackles themes such as philosophy, biology, politics, and science fiction.

“Metaspore”  showcases over twenty installations by Anicka Yi, multifaceted creations that dismantle the boundaries between science and art, between organic and synthetic, between human and non-human, exploring the concepts of metamorphosis, interdependence, ecosystem, and symbiosis.

The exhibition also aims to be a sensory and perceptual experience for visitors through scents, mutating forms, and disorienting biological elements.

Elisa Sighicelli As Above, So Below from March 29 to July 3, 2022 at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan

The Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan presents the solo exhibition of Elisa Sighicelli As Above, So Below, featuring new works on display.

The exhibition indeed brings together a core of about 25 images including photographic prints on paper, a print on plaster, and two sculptures from the sculpture deposit of the GAM in Milan.

Elisa Sighicelli recounts the museum’s storage, home to approximately 800 sculptural objects, including plasters, bronzes, marbles, waxes, mutilated bodies, languid female figures, inscriptions, condottieri, and funerary relics.

As Above, So Below reflects the concept of mirroring between human behavior and that suggested by the sculptures, as well as the recognition of the correspondence between a higher order and a different underground dimension. At the core of this work is the relationship between photography and object, between image and reality, between sculpture and humanity.

The artist indeed chooses to engage with the storage by exploring the expressive potential of individual works or groups, revealing interesting formal relationships and silent dialogues in random juxtapositions.

Henri Cartier – Bresson China 1948-49 | 1958 from February 18 to July 3, 2022 at Mudec in Milan

The Mudec presents  Henri Cartier-Bresson. China 1948-49 | 1958, one of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century, regarded as the pioneer of photojournalism.

The exhibition “Henri Cartier-Bresson. China 1948-49 | 1958”, open until July 3, 2022, was made possible through the collaboration of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and brings together an exceptional corpus of photographs and archival documents from the French photojournalist: over 100 original prints along with period magazine publications, documents, and letters from the collection of the HCB Foundation.

The China is narrated, an unprecedented journey through two key moments in the history of the country: the fall of the Kuomintang (1948-1949) and the “Great Leap Forward” of Mao Zedong (1958). An important moment in the history of world photojournalism, experienced through the personal approach of the master Cartier-Bresson, who was the first to highlight – through the eye of his lens – significant themes of change in contemporary Chinese history, managing to present to the Western world aspects that were kept hidden by regime propaganda, such as the exploitation of human resources and the omnipresence of militias.

Blank from June 9 to July 22, 2022 at the ICA Foundation

ICA Foundation Milan presents, from Thursday, June 9 to Friday, July 22, 2022, the exhibition BLANK, curated by Johana Carrier and Joana P. R. Neves. The traveling retrospective is by the namesake artist Italian-German Irma Blank and is part of a series that includes iterations, each aimed at exploring a facet of the artist’s production and adapted to the specific venue.

The ICA Foundation in Milan is the final stop of the exhibition and it is no coincidence that it is in Milan, the city where the artist has lived and worked since 1973. 

The works focus on identity and critical self-reflection through the use of drawn and wordless languages, characteristics of the artist’s entire body of work.

Blank, since her move to Sicily in 1955, began working on an initial series of introspective works and embarked on an artistic research that would accompany her throughout her life, based on calligraphies born from her imagination and stripped of constraints of meaning. The so-called “asemic or semantic writing,” universal expression of writing and drawing.

Blank’s radical creativity drives her to work, in addition to painting and drawing, with very different media including screen printing, sound, performance, and installation.