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

Turner and Constable: at Tate Britain the landmark exhibition tracing two parallel lives

This autumn, Tate Britain presents an extraordinary exhibition dedicated to the two giants of British landscape painting: J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.

JMW Turner,The Burning of the Houses ofLords and Commons, 16October 1834,1835. Cleveland Museum of Art. Bequest of John L.Severance 1942.647

The show—the first to deeply explore their intertwined lives, contrasts, and mutual influences—celebrates the 250th anniversary of their births and brings together over 170 works, including paintings and works on paper, many of which have rarely been shown in the UK.

Born just one year apart—Turner in bustling London and Constable in the rural quiet of Suffolk—the two artists followed radically different paths. Turner was an early prodigy: he exhibited at the Royal Academy at just 15 and created ambitious works such as The Rising Squall before turning eighteen. Constable, slower and more meditative, shaped his training as a largely self-taught painter, travelling and studying the skies and landscapes of his homeland. Yet the two shared a common goal: to revolutionise landscape painting, transforming it into a genre capable of moving, narrating, and innovating.

The exhibition traces the parallel development of their artistic identities: on one side, Turner’s sublime energy, drawing inspiration from travel sketchbooks to craft visionary Alpine scenes, stormy seas, and daring luminous inventions; on the other, Constable’s precision, rooted in the belief that the sky was the soul of the landscape—studied with almost scientific dedication. For the occasion, Tate brings together a rare group of his celebrated cloud studies, today considered among the most poetic achievements of 19th-century British art.

John Constable,Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, c. 1829. Imagecourtesy of Tate

The dialogue between the two culminates in the 1830s, when critics began systematically opposing them, defining them as “fire and water.” One iconic moment was in 1831, when Constable exhibited his Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows beside Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge: a striking confrontation of atmospheres, poetics, and worldviews, now revived at Tate with the same intensity.

Among the masterpieces on display are Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), not exhibited in Britain for over a century, and Constable’s The White Horse (1819), one of his greatest achievements. These works testify to how both artists—though in opposite ways—expanded the boundaries of landscape painting, elevating it to the scale of grand ambition and profound artistic inquiry.

JMW Turner, The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire,exh.1817. Imagecourtesy of Tate.

The exhibition concludes with a film featuring contemporary artists—including Bridget Riley and Frank Bowling—reflecting on the enduring legacy of Turner and Constable. A living, powerful legacy that continues to influence the way we look at nature, light, and landscape.

Tate Britain

Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

Date

27 novembre – 12 aprile 2026