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

“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