Exhibition | COMBAT ART REVIEW

Eduard Habicher. Memory in Motion

Museion inaugurates its 2026 exhibition program with Eduard Habicher. Memory in Motion, a show dedicated to the 70th birthday of South Tyrolean sculptor Eduard Habicher (born in 1956 in Malles).

The exhibition unfolds across the spaces of Museion Passage and the Piccolo Museion – Cubo Garutti and is free of charge. A leading figure in contemporary sculpture in South Tyrol, Eduard Habicher has consolidated a significant international presence over the decades.

His practice is particularly recognized for large-scale interventions in public space, where sculptural form engages in dialogue with architecture and urban landscapes. His works are permanently installed in both public and private contexts, including the Terme di Merano and the Fundación Pablo Atchugarry in Uruguay; additional works can be found in Berlin, along the River Spree, on the campus of the European Energy Forum (EUREF), as well as in various locations across Italy and Austria.

At Museion Passage, four monumental sculptures – Hommage, Passage, Geöffnet-aperto, and Pro-tetto – are presented in direct dialogue with the museum’s architecture. Created from industrial profiles and stainless steel, the works emerge from a process of highly precise craftsmanship: standardized materials are bent and shaped until they generate a formal tension balanced between mass and lightness. Red, a recurring element in the artist’s visual language, visually unifies the intervention.

Placed directly within the space, without pedestals, the sculptures accompany visitors along Passage, integrating into the daily flow of this open environment. Movement, openness, and spatial awareness are central elements in Habicher’s research and find in Museion Passage a context of particular resonance. As a freely accessible venue, Passage encourages a direct encounter with contemporary art, transcending the conventional thresholds of the museum.

The exhibition project is further enriched by a 360° Virtual Tour that allows visitors to virtually access the artist’s studio, offering an in-depth view of his working environment. The Virtual Tour was created by Camillo Ciuccoli, Creative Technologist.

Chiharu Shiota conquers Turin: MAO surpasses 100,000 visitors

Turin’s MAO sets a historic record: 100,000 visitors in less than four months for The Soul Trembles, the exhibition dedicated to Chiharu Shiota, which opened last October 22. An unprecedented milestone in the exhibition history of the Museum of Oriental Art, confirming the strength of a program capable of combining research, vision, and the ability to engage with the present.

The figure is even more significant when considering its steady trend: around 5,000 visitors per week, with a peak of 15,000 admissions during the Christmas holidays. These numbers tell not only the story of a successful exhibition, but also of the consolidation of a museological transformation that in recent years has broadened both the MAO’s audiences and its languages.

The Soul Trembles is not a simple solo show: it is an intervention that “inhabits” and transforms the spaces of Palazzo Mazzonis, engaging in dialogue with the permanent collections. A project of strong expressive impact, capable of raising universal questions—identity, relationships with others, life and death—and of engaging even those who do not usually visit exhibitions.

Among the most significant indicators is the expansion of the audience: alongside regular museumgoers and subscribers, there has been a growth in younger visitors—particularly in the 20–29 age group—as well as an increase in school participation. At the same time, the exhibition’s success is reflected in the digital sphere: a steadily growing online community, a rise in newsletter subscribers, and a marked increase in organic visibility on Facebook and Instagram, testifying to broader and more sustained audience engagement.

For a “niche” museum like the MAO, this result carries double significance: it demonstrates that scholarly quality can go hand in hand with strong narrative and communicative power. Shiota’s language - deep, emotional, immediate - combined with a communication strategy attentive to digital platforms and accessibility, has made the museum more recognizable and closer to contemporary sensibilities.

A record that is not just a number: it is the sign of a museum changing pace, expanding its audiences, and strengthening its position in Turin and beyond.

Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector

From April 25 to October 19, 2026, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector, the first and most comprehensive museum exhibition ever dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim’s London experience and her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, active at 30 Cork Street between 1938 and 1939. Curated by Gražina Subelytė, Curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Simon Grant, Guest Curator, the exhibition reconstructs a crucial chapter in Guggenheim’s life—one that definitively shaped her future role as a collector and patron of twentieth-century art.

Vasily Kandinsky, Curva dominante (Aprile 1936; olio su tela, 129,2 x 194,3 cm; New York, Museo Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, New York, Fondazione Solomon R. Guggenheim)

The gallery played a fundamental role in shaping the British art scene in the interwar period, increasing the visibility and acceptance of contemporary art at a time when London institutions remained largely conservative. Alongside galleries such as the Redfern Gallery, the Mayor Gallery, and the London Gallery, Guggenheim Jeune challenged established norms and provided an essential platform for avant-garde art. This period was also decisive in defining Peggy Guggenheim’s identity as a patron of the arts, determined to found a museum of modern art in London — a vision ultimately realized in Venice.

Within just eighteen months, Guggenheim Jeune became one of the principal reference points for the artistic avant-gardes of the time, distinguishing itself through the promotion of local and international artists — many connected to Surrealist and abstract movements — and through a bold, experimental program.

In a remarkably short span, from January 1938 to June 1939, Peggy Guggenheim organized more than twenty exhibitions and achieved numerous curatorial milestones, including the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom dedicated to Vasily Kandinsky, a monographic exhibition devoted to Jean Cocteau, the first British exhibition entirely dedicated to collage, a contemporary sculpture exhibition that provoked widespread controversy, and a show featuring works created by children, including a painting by a very young Lucian Freud — marking the celebrated British artist’s exhibition debut.

The exhibition brings together around one hundred key works from major international institutions and private collections, originally shown in these pioneering exhibitions, alongside comparable works from the same period and works by artists whom Peggy Guggenheim would later collect. These include, among others, Eileen Agar, Jean (Hans) Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Vasily Kandinsky, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Cedric Morris, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Yves Tanguy.

The exhibition path includes paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, puppets, and archival materials, conveying the extraordinary variety of languages presented in the gallery and documenting a period of intense artistic experimentation and cultural ferment, marked by profound social and political tensions on the eve of the Second World War. Central to the narrative is also the relational dimension of Peggy Guggenheim’s London experience: the exhibition highlights the decisive role of her friendships and collaborations with key figures of modernism, including Arp, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, and Mary Reynolds, as well as the importance of the network of gallerists and intellectuals active in London during those years.

The exhibition opens with key works of abstraction and Surrealism shown during the brief but intense activity of Guggenheim Jeune, reflecting the principal artistic tendencies underpinning the gallery’s program. Subsequent rooms are devoted to individual exhibitions organized in this space, including those dedicated to Kandinsky, the Russian artist Marie Vassilieff — creator of the genre of “art dolls” and a key figure in transdisciplinary practice — and the contemporary sculpture exhibition, a landmark cultural event in prewar London that demonstrated Peggy Guggenheim’s decisive role in promoting and advancing the acceptance of modern and abstract art in England.

The exhibition continues with portraits by Cedric Morris, a Welsh artist central to the British avant-garde scene, while another gallery is dedicated to exhibitions by American painter Charles Howard, German sculptor Heinz Henghes, and the Studio 17 exhibition — the printmaking workshop founded by Stanley William Hayter. This is followed by a tribute to the historic exhibition Abstract and Concrete Art, featuring works by artists such as Mondrian, Taeuber-Arp, and Van Doesburg.

A gallery is also dedicated to Gisèle Freund’s color photographic portraits, originally presented at Guggenheim Jeune in projection form — a display method the artist favored throughout her life to present her color transparencies of artists and intellectuals. The final rooms bring together works by artists included in the collage exhibition and in the various Surrealist shows, including Kernn-Larsen, André Masson, Reuben Mednikoff, Wolfgang Paalen, Grace Pailthorpe, Man Ray, Tanguy, and John Tunnard.

The exhibition also serves as a tribute to Peggy Guggenheim’s deep affection for England, which she always considered her spiritual homeland and with which she maintained strong ties. Reflecting on her life in a 1976 interview, she stated: “I have been in love with Venice for fifty years. If I did not live here, I would live in the English countryside.”

Following its presentation in Venice, Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London from November 21, 2026, to March 14, 2027, strengthening the international dialogue around a central figure in twentieth-century art history and the context that shaped her development, before continuing to the Guggenheim New York in spring 2027.

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