Helen Chadwick at Museo Novecento: “Life Pleasures,” a Sensory and Radical Retrospective

From 25 November 2025 to 1 March 2026, Museo Novecento in Florence presents the first major Italian retrospective dedicated to Helen Chadwick.

Helen Chadwick with Piss Flower

Life Pleasures, curated by Sergio Risaliti, Stefania Rispoli, and Laura Smith, offers a journey through the work of an artist who revolutionised the way we think about the body, matter, and the image. The exhibition opens on a symbolic date—the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women—highlighting the political and ethical urgency of her practice.

Organised in collaboration with The Hepworth Wakefield and Kunsthaus Graz, the exhibition traces Chadwick’s entire career (1953–1996), from her early work In the Kitchen (1977) to the iconic Piss Flowers (1991–92). It is the first retrospective of this scale in over twenty-five years, offering a long-overdue opportunity to reconsider an artist who, with irony and boldness, challenged aesthetic conventions, cultural taboos, and disciplinary boundaries.

Helen Chadwick,Self Portrait, 1991.Jupiter Artland Foundation.© Estate of HelenChadwick. Courtesy Richard SaltounLondon, Rome, New York

Chadwick conceived the artwork as a total experience—visual, tactile, olfactory, even gustatory—capable of embracing both pleasure and repulsion, desire and disturbance. Her practice spans sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking, and performance, venturing into territories that were, at the time, largely unexplored. Seductive materials such as flowers and fabrics coexist with bodily, organic, or unsettling elements: chocolate, hair, bubble bath, meat, urine, decomposing vegetables. It is within this friction—halfway between sensual and grotesque—that Chadwick forged her unique language.

A feminist, unruly, and visionary figure, she explored themes of sexuality, identity, vulnerability, illness, and beauty through an aesthetic that was both sumptuous and deeply political. She was one of the first women nominated for the Turner Prize (1987) and became a key influence on subsequent generations: among her students were Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, and Damien Hirst. Her impact on the British art scene has been profound and enduring.

Fancy Dress and Sculptures Photograph Book, 1974. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive of Sculptors’ Papers). © Estat e of Helen Chadwick. Courtesy Richard Saltoun London, Rome, New York

Museo Novecento now restores the burning relevance of her work: an oeuvre that continues to question the limits of the body, the role of the feminine, the fragility of matter, and the power of images. Life Pleasures is not merely a retrospective, but an invitation to rediscover an artist able to transform matter into thought—and thought into sensory experience.

Museo Novecento

P.za di Santa Maria Novella, 10, 50123 Firenze

Date

25 novembre – 1 marzo 2026

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