Gastone Novelli: a new monographic exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro on the centenary of his birth

From 15 November 2025 to 1 March 2026, Ca’ Pesaro – the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice – celebrates Gastone Novelli with a major monographic exhibition set across the second floor of the museum.

Gastone Novelli, N. 1 Miles, 1961

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Paola Bonani, in collaboration with the Gastone Novelli Archive in Rome, the show pays tribute to one of the most innovative figures in postwar Italian painting, marking the centenary of his birth.

Novelli (Vienna 1925 – Milan 1968) explored some of the most crucial issues in contemporary art, pushing painting into uncharted territories where word, sign and image coexist in a poetic and revolutionary balance. In Venice—an essential city in his artistic trajectory—around sixty works recount the most intense period of his production, from 1957 to 1968. A brief yet extraordinarily fertile span, dense with visions, ideas and transformations.

The exhibition opens with the informal works of the late 1950s, in which writing emerges as a visual and narrative trace. This is the case of Era glaciale (1958), one of the two works donated to the museum by the artist’s heirs: a painting that seems to surface from a suspended dimension, “the apparition of a magical language,” as Novelli himself described it. In the 1960s, he abandoned Informalism to develop a new sign-based figuration: canvases dense with indecipherable words, reinvented alphabets, archaic symbols and fragments of thought that together form a personal atlas of knowledge. Works such as Dizzy (1960), Il re delle parole (1961) or Thelonious (1960) reveal a painting in dialogue with poetry, music, linguistics, science and psychoanalysis.

Gastone Novelli, II Sala del museo, 1960

Two rooms are devoted to Novelli’s pivotal participations in the Venice Biennale of 1964 and 1968. In 1964 he exhibited a group of “white pages,” visionary works that opposed in tone and intention the triumphant Pop Art of the time. In 1968, he performed one of the most radical gestures in Biennale history: he turned his paintings toward the wall and wrote on the back of one of them “La Biennale è fascista,” becoming a symbol of a season of protest that would forever transform the exhibition.

The exhibition also includes works inspired by his travels in Greece and the 1964 mountain series, as well as the second major Venetian acquisition, Allunga il passo amico mio (1967), created for the restaurant All’Angelo and now part of the civic collections.

Gastone Novelli, Dizzy, 1960

Beyond celebrating the artist, the exhibition marks an important milestone in Novelli scholarship—from the studies conducted by the Gastone Novelli Archive, to the 2011 Catalogue Raisonné, up to recent international exhibitions. At Ca’ Pesaro, Novelli’s work once again appears vivid, resonant, and profoundly capable of speaking to the present with the force of an inexhaustible language.

Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna

C. del Tentor, 2076

Date

15 novembre 2025 - 1 marzo 2026

“Les bonbons cruels”: Agostino Rocco at Candy Snake Gallery

Agostino Rocco brings a new meditation on contemporary painting to the Candy Snake Gallery with Les bonbons cruels, on view from November 26, 2025 to January 3, 2026.

Agostino Rocco, Lemony Cathy, 2025,

The artist—known for his ability to make the tradition of portraiture resonate with today’s most ambiguous and digital visual culture—presents a series of new works accompanied by a critical text by Andrea Contin. The opening is scheduled for Wednesday, November 26 at 6:30 pm in the gallery’s Milan space on Via degli Orombelli.

With this new solo exhibition, Rocco continues a long-standing path that traverses the history of painting in order to reinvent it from within. In his works, the echo of the Flemish masters—from van Eyck to Holbein—is never a mere citation, but a fertile ground for questioning the very nature of the image. As Contin notes, Rocco seems to carry on an ideal conversation with those great painters, pushing painting into a realm where beauty and disturbance meet.

The portraits in Les bonbons cruels embody this tension with striking clarity. These faces do not exist; they are generated from an imaginary that draws on the aesthetics of artificial intelligence without ever surrendering fully to it. They are familiar yet unreadable—“icons without identity”—suspended in a dimension that escapes the boundaries of the real and the unreal. Their polished perfection, heightened by masterfully calibrated light and an invisible brushstroke, produces an emotional short circuit: the viewer feels both attracted and unsettled, as if confronted with a presence that watches us without truly being there.

The strength of Rocco’s work lies precisely in this play of mirrors between seduction and unease. Each painting is the result of a slow, layered process in which drawing, chiaroscuro, and thin oil glazes recreate by hand the cold immediacy of the digital. It is an act of total control—what the artist himself describes as an “existential apnea”: a deep immersion in the gesture of painting, where technique and thought become indistinguishable.

Self-taught and born in 1971, Rocco has built over the years a sophisticated and unmistakable visual language, capable of merging formal rigor with subtle irony. His works have been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Pietrasanta, and Belgium, confirming a coherent and ever-evolving research.

Candy Snake Gallery

Via degli Orombelli 15, Milano

Date

26 novembre – 3 gennaio 2026

“I Would Like to Stay Here a Little Longer”: Erika Pellicci’s First Solo Exhibition at ME Vannucci

From November 30, 2025 to February 16, 2026, ME Vannucci Gallery presents I Would Like to Stay Here a Little Longer, the first solo exhibition by Erika Pellicci, a young Tuscan artist who in recent years has emerged as one of the most sensitive voices in the new Italian photography scene.

Erika Pellicci, Angela compra le sigarette

Accompanied by a text by Moira Ricci, the exhibition brings together twenty previously unseen photographs, including three large prints on fabric that expand the material and immersive dimension of her work

Entering the exhibition means crossing a threshold—the threshold of a “guest room,” a metaphor evoked by the artist herself. A place that is familiar yet never truly inhabited, steeped in suspended memories and lingering expectations. A provisional space, halfway between refuge and emotional archive, where silent presences seem to move just beneath the surface, between past and present, between what remains and what slips away.

Pellicci’s images function as discreet invitations: each one asks the viewer to pause, to linger in the intimate territory where the artist situates her own vulnerability. The photographs, crafted with great attention to gesture and the body, become listening spaces—visual thresholds that question the way we dwell, observe, and inevitably confront what is fragile, mutable, human.

Erika Pellicci, Casa di Andria

The practice of Erika Pellicci—born in Barga in 1992 and trained between Florence and Bologna—centers on the idea of the body as a form in transformation. It is a body that inhabits and unravels, acts and withdraws, capable of becoming myth, legend, or simply reality filtered through the gaze. Through photography, video, and performance, Pellicci constructs a layered symbolic language in which the figure—often her own—becomes a medium for exploring the boundary between intimacy and collectivity, belonging and dissolution.

Erika Pellicci, Uno.. due.. the.. STELLA

The exhibition marks a new chapter in a career already enriched by international recognition: from awards won in China to museum projects in Italy and abroad, and most recently the Spada Partners Prize 2024 in Turin. After participating in numerous group exhibitions, Pellicci now arrives at her first solo show at ME Vannucci, where she had previously presented her work on two different occasions.

Galleria ME VANNUCCI

Via Gorizia, 122 Pistoia

Date

30 novembre 2025 - 16 febbraio 2026