Shirin Neshat | PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea | 28 March – 8 June
As one in all Italy’s first venues solely devoted to modern artwork, PAC is famend for spotlighting key members of the worldwide artwork scene. This spring, they’re exhibiting iconic Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s ‘Physique of Proof’, marking her first main solo present within the nation. Taking up PAC’s sprawling areas, this complete survey of the artist’s three-decade observe brings collectively virtually 200 images alongside ten video installations. Highlights embrace Neshat’s seminal black and white photographic collection ‘Girls of Allah’ (1993–97), a profound investigation into the complexity of feminine identification in post-revolutionary Iran, portraying veiled girls, typically in defiant poses, overlaid with hand-written lyrical traces by feminist Iranian poets; and The Fury (2023), a highly-stylised, double-channel video set up which continues Neshat’s inquiry into feminine our bodies as battlegrounds.
‘POOR BUT SEXY’ | eastcontemporary | 4 March – 12 April
In 2003, former Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit famously known as the town ‘poor however horny’, aiming to lure creatives with low hire and expansive infrastructure. It was an exceptionally profitable rebrand of post-Wall Berlin and, as this eponymous group present posits, a slogan that served as an emblem of how post-1989 Japanese Europe was framed and bought within the West. Orientalised and solid as outsiders, Japanese Europeans typically internalised this submissive relationship. ‘POOR BUT SEXY’ unpacks this sophisticated energy dynamic, navigating historical past, reminiscence and identification by way of the works of six artists, spanning generations, media and nations. In Ala Savashevich’s inkjet-printed video nonetheless Pose. Place. Manner (2023), a pair of excessive heels constituted of Soviet purple stars poke painfully into the toes carrying them – a darky playful implication that the previous legacies won’t be fairly as distant as we hoped. Elsewhere, Anastasia Sosunova’s lithograph Fiction from the ‘Refigured’ collection (2023), is an homage to Lithuania’s underground printing home ab (1980–90), and a uncooked meditation on resistance and identification beneath political censorship.
Goshka Macuga | Vistamare | 5 April – 31 Might
In his brief story ‘Guts’ (1973), Charles Bukowski wrote: ‘I like determined males, males with damaged enamel and damaged minds and damaged methods. They curiosity me. They’re stuffed with surprises and explosions.’ For Goshka Macuga, this pressure between chaos and transformation is the stuff life is product of. In a collection of fascinating, vibrant and explosive oil work, Macuga captures the aftermath of pure disasters (Atoms Rearranged, 2024), warfare (The Story of Wang Tu, 2025) and environmental collapse in an try to painting the delicate steadiness between destruction and renewal. A lone wolf, wandering by way of a post-apocalyptic panorama (Untitled, 1996) provides a message of hope: that, regardless of all of it, there’s nonetheless survival and reinvention.
Thierry De Cordier | Fondazione Prada | 3 April – 29 September
For ‘NADA’, Thierry De Cordier has turned the huge Cisterna rooms of Fondazione Prada right into a spartan area for deep contemplation on the elusive idea of nothingness. Ten of the Belgian artist’s large-scale, eponymous work have been suspended alongside the three rooms of the previous distillery which, because of their sheer top and tall home windows, recast the works in a sacred position. A bench is positioned in entrance of the monumental Gran Nada (2007–12), its deep black hues revealing depths and layers, simply as shapes progressively emerge as our eyes change into accustomed to darkness. Initially, De Cordier’s black monochrome work had been supposed as an act of erasure of the crucifixion, the last word Christian picture. Nevertheless, they took on a extra profound dimension when the artist encountered the phrases of the sixteenth century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross and his ascetical seek for ‘the nothing’. For De Cordier, translated into artwork, this turns into a quest for the last word achievement in portray: the chic.
Yukinori Yanagi | Pirelli HangarBicocca | 27 March – 27 July
Pirelli HangarBicocca’s industrial Navate and Cubo areas host the outstanding work of the Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi in his first main retrospective in Europe. Charting over three many years of his profession, the exhibition brings collectively a few of his key multimedia, immersive items, together with the famend The World Flag Ant Farm 2025 (2025). This stirringly poetic evisceration of nationalism consists of 200 world flags constituted of colored sand poured into plexiglass packing containers linked by tubes, their borders progressively dissolved by 1000’s of reside ants tunnelling dutifully by way of the sand. Elsewhere, the monumental labyrinth Icarus Container 2025 (2025), which lends its identify to the present, is a cautionary work, and a tribute to the Greek fantasy of Icarus and Dedalus. As guests stroll by way of the maze, Yukio Mishima’s galvanising verses from his poem Icarus (1968) are engraved on mirrors, a strong indictment of our obsession with know-how: ‘Why, nonetheless, ought to the lust for ascension / Appear, in itself, so near insanity?’
Sam Lock | Cadogan Gallery | 26 February – 12 April
In a 2019 interview with The London Journal, British artist Sam Lock spoke of the significance of artwork and creativeness as instruments with which to ‘redress indirectly the blankness and dumbing down of the world’. His newest exhibition at Cadogan Gallery’s Milanese venue does simply that, unfolding like a visible poem by way of greater than 70 works. Brushstrokes, traces and marks in blues and whites disappear and reappear on different works, highlighting the bond between the works themselves – the hyperlinks between fragment and entire – and the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with presence and absence. The 5 bigger works, Stanza I-V (all works 2024), have been minimize and stretched from the identical roll of uncooked canvas, whereas the smaller items, Fraction 1 – 34, which dot the gallery like musical notes, have been painted on paper pasted to resin-coated, sanded panels. The ensuing present is a testomony to the simple energy of artwork to change and nurture us.
Gian Maria Tosatti | Galleria Lia Rumma | 21 March – 8 Might | Ex Magazzini Raccordati | 22 March – 11 April
Gian Maria Tosatti is greatest recognized for his formidable, large-scale, immersive installations that rework uncared for city areas into poignant investigations into identification and politics. In his newest endeavour, Tosatti presents two concurrent exhibits. ‘Paradiso’ consists of a site-specific set up set within the 3000 sq. metres of the cavernous Ex Magazzini Raccordati, a former warehouse area situated beneath Milan Central Railway Station. The dripping underground vaults provide a imaginative and prescient of a dystopian paradise worthy of an Octavia Butler novel, its seven vaults of heaven symbolically caved in, angels changed with the homeless, the backyard of Eden with filthy latrines and puddles. This, we’re warned, is the heaven that humanity’s harmful nature is able to wreaking. Over at Galleria Lia Rumma, ‘Es Brent!’ options new multi-media works and work that type a scathing critique of the world at this time. A part of his venture Fondamenta (2011-ongoing), six giant clear flags dangle from tall poles simply outdoors the gallery, alluding to the invisible palms governing our world, whereas, inside, a collection of work from the ‘Fireworks’ collection (2024) depict evening skies beneath bombardment. The exhibition borrows its title from Mordkhe Gebirtig’s celebrated Yiddish track, whose verses ‘Every part now burns! And also you stand there wanting on, palms folded’ are as prophetic at this time as they had been in 1938.
Important picture: Goshka Macuga, Large and Small Blasts, 2025, oil on canvas, 1.9 × 2.5 m. Courtesy: the artist and Vistamare, Milano / Pescara
