Meret Oppenheim in the street exhibitions at Palazzo Bentivoglio

Palazzo Bentivoglio’s “street exhibition” series continues in the display window facing Via del Borgo di San Pietro with a new installment: the focus is on the work of Meret Oppenheim, one of the most original artists of European Surrealism.

Through June 6, 2026, Wednesday–Saturday, 7:00 PM–11:00 PM

Meret Oppenheim, Traccia, 1972, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, ph. Carlo Favero

Bologna, May 21, 2026. Palazzo Bentivoglio’s “street exhibition” program continues, featuring works displayed in the space’s window facing Via del Borgo di San Pietro. Through June 6, 2026, the star of the BENTIVOGLIO garage is Traccia (1972) by Meret Oppenheim, a work in which the Swiss artist transforms a piece of furniture into an ambiguous and unsettling presence, suspended between memories of the past and surrealist metamorphosis. Two brass legs fixed beneath an elliptical top evoke the remnant of an interrupted mutation: a familiar form that escapes its function and instead opens up to a poetic and animalistic imagination.

The work was created within the context of Ultramobile, a project launched in the early 1970s by Simon, the company founded in 1968 by the Bolognese entrepreneur Dino Gavina together with Maria Simonicini. Following pivotal experiences such as those at Gavina Spa and Flos, Gavina embarked on a radically different direction with Simon, entrusting artists—rather than designers—with the opportunity to reinvent the domestic object. Going against the grain of the major transformations in Italian design of the period—marked by student and working-class protests that brought new social needs and desires to the fore—Ultramobile drew on an imagery rooted in Dadaism and Surrealism, reinterpreting works and ideas in which form renounced all practical purpose to embrace the poetic and symbolic.

Eva e Franco Mattes, Ceiling cat, 2016

In these years, as Italian design is profoundly redefining its own language—thanks in part to international dialogue and the historic exhibition curated by Emilio Ambasz at MoMA in New York—Gavina’s work follows a different trajectory. As curator Davide Trabucco states, “it has no connection to the questions of those years.” The artists’ works are not tied to any corporate know-how, but are the result of the individual’s creative flair; there is no relationship between form and function, and above all, rather than foreshadowing new worlds, they seem to evoke reassuring vestiges of the past, which we have already encountered in some fantasy or dreamlike moment.”

In Traccia, Oppenheim draws on this dreamlike dimension and his own surrealist zoomorphic vocabulary to give form to an object that defies classification. The golden legs supporting the elliptical surface belong to an indefinable animal: “too large to belong to a normal chicken, too small to perhaps belong to a now-extinct prehistoric creature. But on the surface we find some traces; others like it have undergone the same transformation, yet managed to fly away from us.”