5+1 Exhibitions for Summer 2022

Is the summer heat putting a strain on your plans? The rich program of exhibitions, in Italy and abroad, may be the solution to discover new works of art and escape the heat. Crown your vacation or treat yourself to an art-filled weekend away.

Summer 2022: the must-see exhibitions

Between contemporary artists and great masters, here's a list of must-see exhibitions in summer 2022!

Banksy: Genius or Vandal?

Centro de Congressos da Alfândega do Porto, Portugal. Through September 20, 2022

A major exhibition in Portugal dedicated to the iconic British artist Banksy. The exhibition Banksy: Genius or Vandal? aims to bring the viewer into the controversial world and artistic universe of Banksy thanks to more than 70 artworks: from original works from private collections, to sculptures, a multimedia installation, and even photos and videos revealing details about the mysterious British artist.

The exhibition is divided into sections with the most iconic themes of Banksy's artistic production, including war, Brexit, consumerism, and the police.

Banksy: Genius or Vandal?

Play - Videogame Art e Oltre

Reggia di Venaria, Italy. Through January 15, 2023

Play - Videogame Arte e Oltre

For the first time in the world, a unique exhibition combining the world of classical artists with video games will be on view at Venaria Reale. The exhibition aims to show viewers the influences of the great masters of the past, such as De Chirico, Hokusai, Calder, Dorè, Savinio, Piranesi, Kandinsky, and Warhol on the aesthetics of video games. A major exhibition investigating video games as a "tenth art form" will take place along the twelve rooms of the exhibition route of the Halls of Arts, where digital canvases of the great video game masters enter into dialogue with celebrated masterpieces of the past and present, inviting us to reflect on new aesthetics.

The convergence of static image, moving image and interactive image is at the center of the PlayArt space, which brings visitors to relate to living artists such as Bill Viola, Banksy, Invaders, Cao Fai, Jago, Tabor Robak, the AES+F collective, and Federico Clapis, who have drawn on the language of (video)game to bring to life some of their material and digital works.

The exhibition Play - Videogame Art e Oltre recognizes the profound impact in contemporary society of a creative compartment still often perceived as a world of playful escapism and mere pastime.

Videogames represent a creative outpost where ideas and visions are born, where architecture, painting, sculpture, music, performing arts, poetry, cinema, and comics coexist, giving rise to layered collective worlds.

Matisse The Red Studio.

MoMA, New York. Through September 10, 2022

For many years after its creation, Henri Matisse's The Red Studio was met with dismay or indifference, while today it is known as one of the foundational artworks of modern art and a milestone in the centuries-old tradition of studio painting.

The Red Studio, a key artwork in the exhibition, depicts the artist's work space in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Together with the canvas, Matisse's six surviving paintings, three sculptures and ceramics depicted on his canvas will be brought together. For the first time since they were together in Matisse's studio at the time The Red Studio was made, these objects will be brought together, and there will be a chance to see revolutionary paintings such as Le Luxe II, lesser-known paintings such as Corsica and The Old Mill, to objects that have been rediscovered only recently.

Paintings and drawings closely related to The Red Studio will help illuminate the painting's history: its rejection by the patron who commissioned it, its international travels, and its acquisition by MoMA.

Matisse The Red Studio

A rich selection of archival materials, including photographs and letters, will reveal new information about the painting's subject and history. The exhibition will also explore the radical nature of its almost entirely red surface and present recent discoveries about the process of its making.

Picasso Ingres: Face to Face

National Gallery, London. Through Oct. 9, 2022

Picasso Ingres: Face to Face

The exhibition Picasso Ingres: Face to Face is a unique opportunity to see for the first time Pablo Picasso's Woman with a Book alongside the work that inspired the artist, namely Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' Madame Moitessier.

Made almost a century apart, the two portraits will draw a continuous thread between the artistic development of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Picasso first saw Ingres' enigmatic artwork at an exhibition in Paris in 1921. Bewitched and fascinated by the enigmatic work, he repeatedly referred to Ingres in his art over the next decade and painted Woman with a Book as follows.

"Minor artists borrow, great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso

Although the style of the two paintings is completely different, the dialogue that results from juxtaposing the two artworks is absolutely unique. On the one hand, we have the portrait by Ingres, who, immersed in the academic tradition, portrays the beautiful and wealthy Madame Moitessier as a model of representation of the classical ideal. On the other hand, Picasso decides to portray his then lover Marie-Thérèse Walterintent on imitating Madame Moitessier's distinguished pose.

Picasso's abstractionism lends sensuality and reserve to the painting within which the latent eroticism is striking. This aspect contrasts with Ingres' image of respectable bourgeoisie, in which Madame Moitessierwears jewelry and fine clothes and majestically observes the viewer, perfectly embodying the luxury and style of the Second Empire.

Alex Katz. La vita dolce

Mart Rovereto, Italy. Through September 18, 2022

Alex Katz. La vita dolce

La Vita dolce is the exhibition that the Mart dedicates to the master of contemporary painting Alex Katz.

More than 20 years after his last Italian exhibition, the Mart presents in a single exhibition and for the first time a wide selection of the works exhibited in Italy since the 1990s. More than 40 large canvasesconstitute a colorful itinerary in which the two major genres explored by the artist are represented: portraits and landscapes.

"The stubborn will to represent, without restlessness and disturbances, a golden age, a perfect time in which everything is still, in an eternal spring, in an endless youth. Everything is still in Katz, the people and nature. Women are eternally young, life is always happy, spirits are imperturbable. Katz is the painter of ataraxia." - Vittorio Sgarbi

Katz reworks references from mass culture, American society, television, advertising and, in close-ups and shots, cinema. At the same time, he appropriates minimalist principles by stripping them of ideological harshness and dwelling on the more exquisitely formal characters that define collective taste.

Distant from "intellectualisms," he describes life for what it is, in search of beauty and harmony. In his canvases the atmospheres are suspended, serene, beyond the frenetic time of work and worries. In homes, trips to the beach, everyday life, portraits and landscapes Katz depicts only what he knows: his New York and beloved Maine, where he spends long periods of time, his dearest people, relatives and friends, and countless times his wife Ada, true and first muse, the protagonist of more than 200 works.

Banksy. L’artista del presente

Mart Rovereto, Italy. Through September 11, 2022

Banksy. L’artista del presente

For the first time in Trento the long-awaited exhibition of the mysterious British artist Banksy, a true cult for more than one generation.

The exhibition features a strictly non-commercial Banksy, treating him for the first time as if he were one of the great classical artists. On display are Banksy's most famous and enigmatic works, images and forms of unprecedented ethical, evocative and thematic power, a selection of the silkscreens that have become a must-have among international collectors, true devotional objects that delineate the protagonists of Banksy's imagery. These are the images that have marked the planetary success of one of the most complex, ingenious and intuitive artists of our century.

“Banksy. L’artista del presente (The Artist of the Present) is an exhibition about the meaning of the artistic insurgence of the 2000s of which the anonymous Bristol artist is the world's leading exponent. By delving into Banksy's urban art through an academic perspective, the exhibition opens up an unprecedented view of the artist. We deal with this artist with the same method we use for the Renaissance greats. With us, Banksy also becomes a "classic," studied and proposed with rigor and quality.” - President of MetaMorphosis Pietro Folena