NEWS PRINCIPALE 15/25

Matt Mullican. That Person’s Heaven at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo

From November 14, 2025, to January 18, 2026, the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo hosts That Person’s Heaven, a major solo exhibition by Matt Mullican, curated by Stefano Raimondi and produced by The Blank Contemporary Art.

Shiota Chiharu, Uncertain Journey, 2016/2019 — *That Person's Heaven, Matt Mullican*

Free and open to the public, the show inaugurates the 15th edition of the ArtDate Contemporary Art Festival, supported by Regione Lombardia and the Municipality of Bergamo, marking the return to Italy of one of the most influential contemporary artists after his 2018 retrospective at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.

Since the 1970s, Matt Mullican (born in Santa Monica in 1951, living and working in New York and Berlin) has developed a complex system of symbols, pictograms, and color codes that map the structures of human knowledge and experience. In this chromatic cosmology, green represents material reality, blue everyday life, yellow ideas, red subjectivity, and black and white language itself. This visual grammar has become the artist’s method for shaping a personal universe—a conceptual grid through which to interpret existence.

The exhibition title refers to That Person, an alter ego that Mullican embodies under hypnosis, a persona that acts and speaks independently from the artist, expressing an unfiltered, at times childlike consciousness. The new large-scale installation on view in Bergamo was created entirely in a hypnotic state: a monumental 16x16 meter grid made up of thirty-two equal panels, half in black and white, half in red.

Produced in collaboration with Aquafil S.p.A. and Radici Pietro Industries & Brands S.p.A., both leaders in sustainable textile innovation, the work merges artistic exploration and advanced industrial processes. Here, the rational order of the grid meets the unpredictability of trance, generating a conceptual tension between structure and chaos.

Hypnosis becomes a tool for exploring altered states of consciousness, while silence—the central theme of ArtDate 2025—emerges not as emptiness but as a structural element that amplifies introspection and perception.

Philip Guston If This Be Not I 1945 Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Univerity purchase, Kende Sale Fund, The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth — *Matt Mullican*

As Mullican explains: “Everything is in the mind. All images are mental. The black-and-white side is painted by that person; it’s about daily emotions and actions we don’t remember. The red side is about heaven, God, demons, and angels—different parts of the same story.”

In That Person’s Heaven, the artist turns inward, using the hypnotic state as a metaphor for artistic creation itself: an act of surrender to the unconscious, where meaning surfaces through images and gesture rather than intention.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale, with essays by Stefano Raimondi and Roberta Tenconi, and by a program of free educational workshops for children, curated by The Blank’s educational department.

Shiota Chiharu, Accumulation - Searching for the Destination 2014/2019 — *Matt Mullican*

With That Person’s Heaven, Mullican reaffirms art’s power to bridge the conscious and the unseen, transforming silence into a field of revelation.

Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo

Piazza Vecchia, 8A

Date

14 novembre 2025 - 18 gennaio 2026

At MAO Turin, the Third Edition of Declinazioni Contemporanee: Between Myth and Identity

At the MAO – Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, the third edition of Declinazioni Contemporanee unfolds: a program of artist residencies and site-specific commissions inviting contemporary artists to engage with the museum’s evolving collection.

Opened on November 1, 2025, the project reaffirms MAO’s role as a space of experimentation and cultural rewriting, where historical objects are reactivated through the gaze of contemporary art.

Curated by the MAO team, the initiative brings together voices from three continents, offering new interpretations of the museum’s heritage and restoring meaning to objects that have long remained silent.

In the Tibetan gallery, filmmakers and artists Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam present a sound installation inspired by the rare fragments from the Densatil Monastery in central Tibet. Once a spiritual and political hub of the Phagmo Drupa dynasty (14th–15th centuries), the monastery was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, its treasures scattered among museums and private collections worldwide.

Through the voice of Virūḍhaka, the Guardian King of the South, the installation evokes the beauty and tragic fate of Densatil, transforming the gallery into a space of remembrance and spiritual resonance.

In the Chinese galleries, Korean artist Sunmin Park presents Pale Pink Universe (2025), a video installation accompanied by a series of drawings exploring the relationship between nature and human intervention through the lens of agriculture and winemaking.

Created during her residency at CastelGiocondo in Montalcino as part of the Artisti per Frescobaldi project, the work intertwines Tuscan landscape, medieval poetry, and cosmic imagination. Inspired by a sonnet by Dino Frescobaldi, Park’s voice recites the English translation while microscopic images of grape particles merge with vast cosmic vistas, accompanied by a composition by Bojan Vuletic. The series of three drawings will enter the MAO’s permanent collection.

Between the Chinese and Japanese galleries, Francesco Simeti presents Description Generale (A Historical Map of the Other), a site-specific installation combining wallpaper, fabric elements, and luminous glass sculptures created in collaboration with WonderGlass.

The work offers a critical reinterpretation of the Silk Roads, revealing how Western imagination has historically exoticized and appropriated Asian cultures. The glowing pagoda-like objects, crafted through both traditional Murano glassblowing and modern casting techniques, suspend between delicacy and solidity, evoking a dreamlike, hybrid landscape.

The opening also featured Tape Music, a participatory performance by Taiwanese artist Lin Chi-Wei, previously presented at Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Venice and Shanghai Biennales.

Part of the project Yue Ji 樂記, curated by Freya Chou, the performance engaged the audience in reading sound scores written on long scrolls of paper, generating a collective, ritual-like chorus that explored the themes of loss, consolation, and memory in dialogue with MAO’s Chinese funerary collection.

With Declinazioni Contemporanee #3, MAO confirms its role as a living laboratory of intercultural dialogue, where history meets technology and the past speaks through contemporary art.

MAO Torino

Via San Domenico 11

Date

1 novembre 2025 - 26 aprile 2026

Tutto qui? The Monograph of Lucia Marcucci between Art, Poetry and Feminism

From November 2025 to June 2026, Museion and Ar/Ge Kunst present Lucia Marcucci. Tutto qui?, the first monographic publication dedicated to the pioneering Italian artist Lucia Marcucci.

Edited by Frida Carazzato (Museion) and Francesca Verga (Ar/Ge Kunst), and published by bruno (Venice), the book stems from two exhibitions held in 2023 — Lucia Marcucci. Poesie e no at Museion and L’Offesa at Ar/Ge Kunst — the outcome of a shared research project between the two institutions.

Backed by the Italian Council (XIII edition, 2024) of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, the book is accompanied by an international presentation tour that maps a European constellation of venues and readers: from Centro Pecci in Prato to Palazzo Butera in Palermo, from MART in Rovereto to the Université de Liège, and on to the University of Sussex in Brighton and CAP – Centre d’art contemporain de Saint-Fons in France. Each stop will open a public forum around Marcucci’s work, its historical roots and its striking relevance today.

Featuring essays by Claudia Crocco, Gilda Policastro, Francesco Tenaglia, Maria Alicata, Annalisa Sacchi, Giulia Crispiani, Dalila Colucci, Vanessa Desclaux and Raffaella Perna, the publication assembles a polyphonic portrait of a central figure in Italian Visual Poetry.

Marcucci’s practice—born in close dialogue with Gruppo 70—splices word and image, advertising grammar and literary citation, deploying irony as a sharp tool against consumerist ideology, gendered stereotypes and imperial politics in post-war Italy.

The predominance of women contributors is itself a curatorial stance, mirroring the artist’s sustained challenge to systems that objectified the female body and flattened subjectivity into commodity.

By threading art, poetry and activism, the book makes plain why her legacy continues to shape curatorial thought and feminist discourse, informing new generations of artists and scholars who work across media and platforms

Far from asking “is that all?”, Tutto qui? becomes an open question—an invitation to reopen archives, re-read images, and reclaim language as a living material. In doing so, it affirms Lucia Marcucci as one of the most lucid, radical voices in Italian contemporary art.

Museion Bolzano

Piazza Piero Siena 1

Date

Novembre 2025 - Giugno 2026

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