Simona Uberto - FATUM FUTURA Retrospective Exhibition 1996–2026

The Banca Popolare di Lodi Foundation dedicates to Simona Uberto, in the Bipielle Arte exhibition space, the retrospective Fatum Futura, retracing thirty years of artistic research spanning photography, installation, and visionary landscapes. The exhibition features around fifty works — from the early urban photographs to the mirage-like images of the Fata Morgana series — forming a journey that explores the boundary between reality and imagination, with the title — poised between fate and future — serving as a key to understanding the artist’s poetics.

Simona Uberto, Masse, 2008, black-and-white photographic print on laser-cut aluminum. Photo by Paolo Rinarelli.

Fatum Futura, the major retrospective exhibition curated by Maria Laura Gelmini and dedicated to Simona Uberto (Savona, 1965), opening on 27 February in the Bipielle Arte spaces — the exhibition venue of the Banca Popolare di Lodi Foundation, directed by Paola Negrini — offers a broad and coherent overview of thirty years of the artist’s research. Uberto, who has taught Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts since the 1990s, brings together approximately fifty works spanning photography, installation, collage, sculpture, and environmental interventions.

The title stems from an intuition of the artist and condenses the poetic core of the project: a reflection on the tension between what precedes us and what awaits us — between destiny and possibility, predetermination and a gaze toward the future. “Fatum, from the Latin fari, means that which has already been spoken — the oracle-word that becomes destiny,” explains Uberto, “while Futura indicates what is yet to come, what does not yet exist. It is a space of questions, suspended between what has been said and what we are still building.”

This dialectic between origin and becoming runs throughout her practice: a body of work that always begins from the real — a photographic shot, an urban fragment, a landscape — and transforms into vision, narrative, and mirage.

Since the 1990s, Simona Uberto has moved along a fine line that separates — and connects — documentation and imagination. Early cycles dedicated to urban life (including Interferenze, Aggregazioni, Appartenenze, and Incontri) portray everyday experience as a constellation of micro-narratives: passersby captured in public spaces, minimal movements becoming visual rhythm, geometries trapping suspended moments. These are not simple photographs, but “temporal frames” that render the city a stage for unconscious actions.

Simona Uberto, Border-linee fronte, 2001, installation, variable dimensions, black-and-white photograph on laser-cut wood, painted red.

In recent years, her research has moved beyond the urban dimension, opening onto a new territory: landscape as mirage, mental space, projection. From this shift emerged the Fata Morgana series — images that oscillate between reality and illusion, between the visible and the visionary. The artist dissects the photographic image, enlarges it, flips it, fragments and recomposes it, overturning familiar perspectives and logics. Sky becomes land, water becomes sky, skylines invert: perception wavers, yet it is precisely within this disorientation that the deeper meaning of her work resides. A principle that applies to her entire production: from cut silhouettes to landscape compositions, the image does not reproduce — it reinvents. As Simona Bartolena has written in an essay dedicated to Uberto, her works “are not landscapes but mirages. They deceive us like the phenomenon of the Fata Morgana: fantastic, mutable, destabilizing places that reveal the fragility of our visual certainties.” The effect is what René Magritte described as “the moment of panic”: the instant in which the viewer realizes that represented reality does not coincide with perceived reality.

Simona Uberto’s creative process is both meditative and rigorous. The artist begins with a photographic shot, “as if walking along a small road that becomes a path”: she enters the image, explores it, studies its internal structure, until every point of reference dissolves. Only then does she recompose it into a new form that no longer belongs to the real, but to a suspended elsewhere between memory and invention. In Fatum Futura, this method is amplified: the image becomes sign, the landscape becomes language, the mirage takes shape.

As the curator observes: “Although knowledge of an artist’s working process — while offering additional interpretative keys — is not essential to the experience of the work, in Uberto’s case, understanding the procedure can make a difference. The lightness emanating from her works is the result of meticulous labor, where technological and artisanal aspects converge.”

The artist constructs her works through a balance of mathematics and poetry, control and surrender. It is precisely in this shift — from reality to its poetic translation — that the strength of her practice is rooted.

Installed in the Bipielle Arte spaces — within the Business Center designed by Renzo Piano — the exhibition unfolds as a journey through three decades of work: from early photographic series focused on urban flows to installations that question spatial perception, culminating in the most recent deconstructed landscapes and the visions of Fata Morgana, where nature becomes both enigma and revelation.

The exhibition path is conceived as a passage: visitors move through works that open thresholds and crossings. Each piece challenges the stability of the image, inviting a reconsideration of the relationship between what we see and what we believe we see.

Simona Uberto - FATUM FUTURA

February 28 - March 22, 2026

Opening: Friday, February 27 - 5:30 PM

Via Polenghi Lombardo - 26900 Lodi (LO)