Blog | COMBAT ART REVIEW

Milano Art Week 2026 – 10th edition April 13–19, 2026

Milan, April 24, 2026 – An intense and widely attended week for the 10th edition of Milan Art Week, which concluded on Sunday, April 19. More than 500 events, promoted by 263 institutions, foundations, museums, universities, galleries, and independent spaces, enlivened the city for an entire week with exhibitions, talks, performances, workshops, and special openings.

Alina Chaiderov, *Transition*, 2024, Courtesy of the artist and Ciaccia Levi, Paris_Milano - Sala della Griselda, Castello Sforzesco - Ph. Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

Milan Art Week — promoted by the Municipality of Milan, coordinated by Arte Totale ETS, and held with main sponsor Banca Generali — once again transformed the city into a widespread and dynamic system dedicated to contemporary art, consolidating its role as a key platform for the Italian and European art scene.

With a broad and cross-disciplinary programme — 243 exhibitions, 183 openings, 62 workshops, 46 talks, 45 site-specific installations, 41 guided tours, 32 performances, 25 special openings, 11 screenings, and 3 fairs — the event presented the image of a city where contemporary culture develops across the urban fabric, involving major museums, independent spaces, universities, and everyday city venues.

Among the protagonists of this edition were internationally renowned artists with exhibitions and projects across the city, including Maurizio Cattelan, Jeremy Deller, Cao Fei, Marco Fusinato, Fabio Giampietro, Mona Hatoum, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Steve McCurry, Otobong Nkanga, Gianni Pettena, Chiharu Shiota, Hito Steyerl, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, alongside historical figures such as Man Ray and Bruno Munari.

Joana Escoval, *Wind blow, plants bloom, leaves mature and are blown away,* 2021 - Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare, Pescara _ Milan- Museo di Storia Naturale - Ph. Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

A central role was played by the city’s institutions — from the Museo del Novecento to PAC, from GAM to MUDEC, as well as Castello Sforzesco and Palazzo Reale — all of which presented exhibitions and events dedicated to contemporary art in its many forms of expression. They were joined by private foundations, independent spaces, and galleries, contributing to the creation of a plural and widespread programme.

Among the new projects, Ghost Track attracted great interest: a citywide initiative across the Civic Museums that brought contemporary works into dialogue with historical collections, offering new interpretations of the city’s heritage. Also well received by the public was Art Night on Saturday, April 18, which saw museums and cultural spaces extend their evening opening hours, allowing visitors to experience the city from a new perspective.

There was also strong participation in Art for Tomorrow Talks – The Blurry Border Between Design & Art, held in partnership with the Democracy and Culture Foundation and The New York Times, in collaboration with Milano & Partners and with the support of DILS. The talks offered international moments of reflection on the relationship between art and design. Finally, the talk Il tempo dell’arte: velocità del mercato vs tempo della cultura, organized by Banca Generali, also recorded a remarkable turnout.

Gina Folly, *Love VII*, 2019 - Courtesy of the artist and FANTA MLN, Milano - Museo d_Arte Antica, Castello Sforzesco - Ph. Sebastiano Pellion di Persa

Special events were also numerous, with performances engaging with the urban space and creating a widespread, accessible experiential dimension that attracted broad public participation. Particularly well attended were the performances by Marco Fusinato at PAC and Benni Bosetto at Pirelli HangarBicocca, as well as CORPI SUL PALCO, curated by Gabi Scardi and Andrea Contin, which activated Alberto Burri’s Teatro Continuo. Among the most original events was the itinerant concert Mototrombe!, presented by Aronne Pleuteri with Associazione Artisti di Strada, recalling the futurist noise aesthetics of Luigi Russolo.

At the same time, international fairs, including miart in its 30th edition and the first Milan edition of Paris Internationale, strengthened the city’s appeal for collectors, professionals, and international audiences.

Once again, Banca Generali, main sponsor of the event, helped enrich the programme with initiatives for the public, while SEA Milan Airports and BiM supported the programme with projects spread across the urban area, bringing art into the city’s places of transit and gathering.

This edition was realised with the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo. Guide Partner: My Art Guide; Media Partner: ARTnews Italia. Supporter: Art Night Bird & Bird.

UNIQUE and Massimo Alba present Pau Aguiló

On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2026, the project dedicated to the promotion of young artists conceived by Bruno Gnocchi meets Massimo Alba, a leading name in the world of fashion, giving rise to an exhibition that brings different practices and sensibilities into dialogue, in an intimate exchange between visual researches.

On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2026, UNIQUE, a project dedicated to the promotion of young artists and conceived by Bruno Gnocchi, launches a new collaboration with Massimo Alba, a distinctive voice in Milanese fashion, long attentive to the relationship between art, material, and clothing, to present an exhibition by the young Spanish artist Pau Aguiló (Palma, 2002).

The project confirms UNIQUE’s ability to generate connections between different languages and contexts, with the aim of supporting and giving visibility to emerging practices.

Within Massimo Alba’s Milan showroom, UNIQUE invites Aguiló to present a selection of paintings, building a measured dialogue between artistic research, textile surface, and brand identity. The intervention fits within the project’s broader vision, aimed at supporting voices capable of inhabiting hybrid spaces and activating forms of exchange.

Trained in Fine Arts at Camberwell College of Arts in London, Pau Aguiló has developed a distinctive painterly language in which imagination, memory, and a sense of place are interwoven. His works create a tension between inner and outer dimensions, nourished by the landscapes that have shaped his trajectory: from the forests of Mallorca to the urban fabric of London.

The collaboration between UNIQUE and Massimo Alba stems from a shared vision in which art and clothing are not conceived as finished objects, but as open processes, capable of absorbing time, traces, and narratives. During Milan Design Week, the showroom takes shape as a suspended space between domestic setting, atelier, and artist’s studio, where paintings, garments, and different materials coexist in a carefully balanced dialogue.

For UNIQUE, this project marks a further step in consolidating a platform able to connect different disciplines, fostering exchanges between artists, brands, and audiences. Pau Aguiló’s intervention at Massimo Alba’s showroom embodies this tension with precision, unfolding as an experience in which the artistic work enters into relation with its context, expanding its field of meaning.

ERWIN WURM - Dreamers. The exhibition at the Fortuny Museum

Fortuny Museum presents a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Erwin Wurm (Bruck an der Mur, Austria, 1954), one of the most influential contemporary artists. Over the course of his career, Wurm has profoundly rethought the very concept of sculpture: expanding notions of time, mass, and surface, abstraction and representation, while placing the body and the everyday object at the center of a reflection that transcends traditional boundaries between art and life.

Humor, a fundamental tool in his practice, opens onto philosophical and social questions: Wurm stages the tensions of contemporary society, criticizing the pressures of capitalism and externally imposed constructions of identity. The liminal space between “high” and “low,” between the monumental and the banal, becomes the privileged territory of a farcical and paradoxical reality. As Erwin Wurm states, “The ordinary is so close and so familiar to us that we are inclined to overlook it. Looking at the ordinary from the perspective of the absurd and the paradox gives us the opportunity to see something different, perhaps more interesting.”

Welcoming his work into the rooms of Museo Fortuny means accepting a double challenge to gravity: the physical one, which governs volumes and masses, and the historical one, exercised by the cultural stratification of one of the city’s most memory-laden places.

After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Applied Arts in Vienna between the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wurm gained international recognition with the celebrated One Minute Sculptures (1996–97), presented on the second floor of the museum, where visitors can directly interact with them. In these works, the artist provides instructions inviting the public to perform actions or poses with everyday objects—furniture, chairs, bottles, books, sweaters—transforming the human body into a temporary sculpture. The work is by nature ephemeral: it exists in the gesture, in the duration of one minute, and survives through photographic documentation, often produced using the instant medium of Polaroid, a true “taxidermy of the instant.”

At the same time, Wurm anthropomorphizes common objects in unexpected ways, as in the Dreamers works, in which oversized cushions supported by human limbs—legs, arms, feet—in often awkward or precarious positions become metaphors for the dream world, exploring the tension between the physical body and the psychological dimension of the unconscious.

Within the museum, the dialogue focuses in particular on clothing as a sculptural extension of the body. In the Substitutes series, Wurm presents garments devoid of the human figure, monuments to absence or membranes that retain the final gesture of those who inhabited them. The analogy is with Fortuny’s Delphos, a shell ready to receive the body, yet lacking autonomous structure without it. An emblematic comparison emerges between Fortuny’s Knossos shawl and the sculpture Yikes, simple rectangles of material that acquire meaning only in relation to the person. Knossos is an “open” scenic device, requiring a creative gesture in order to become a living sculpture; Yikes, by contrast, freezes the instant in which that gesture has just dissolved. In both cases, the work exists in the time of action, on the threshold between presence and absence.

In these terms, the eccentric dialogue with Mariano Fortuny takes shape: a polymathic genius—stage designer, inventor, painter, and designer—Fortuny transformed Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei into a total laboratory, where light, architecture, and textile merged into a unified work of art. Museo Fortuny today takes the form of a true physical “semiosphere”: an environment in which heterogeneous texts, forms, and memories collide, generating new explosions of meaning.

To enter Palazzo Fortuny during this exhibition, in particular, means immersing oneself in a living architectural organism, a sensitive membrane where objects and container engage in a continuous exchange. Wurm’s work enters this palimpsest as an element of controlled destabilization: his sculptures bend, swell, and contract under the weight of thought and irony, transforming the museum into a laboratory of contemporary identity. Yesterday, as today.

In this encounter between the solidity of the past and the precariousness of the present, a crucial question emerges: in a world in which we are constantly called upon to “give ourselves a form,” what remains of us when the pose dissolves?

The exhibition invites the public to engage with this tension, recognizing in the human being itself the ultimate plastic material.

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