LE SIRENUSE GUIDE TO ITALIAN ART & CULTURE EVENTS 2024

Bear in mind also that one of our favourite places in Naples, the Madre contemporary art museum, has two intriguing shows lined up for later this year, once essential maintenance work is concluded. One is dedicated to Salerno-born poet and performance artist Tomaso Binga – pseudonym of Bianca Pucciarelli Menna – the other centred on modern and contemporary artworks that relate intensely to the times in which they were created, inspired by Nobel-prizewinning French author Annie Ernaux’s memoir The Years. As soon as we have firm dates for these two exhibitions, we’ll let you know.

 

March 3 – June 9

Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni dedicates a major retrospective to pioneering Italian abstract artist Carla Accardi (1924-2014) on the centenary of her birth.

 

March 16 – June 30

Bruno Munari, the restless design genius defined by French culture critic Pierre Restany as “the Leonardo and Peter Pan of Italian design” is the focus of a career-spanning show at the Fondazione Magnani Rocca near Parma.

 

March 22 – July 28

Recently the focus of a documentary by Wim Wenders, art world giant Anselm Kiefer takes over Palazzo Strozzi in Florence for a show that highlights his links with the Tuscan Renaissance.

 

April 16-21

Milan’s Salone del Mobile Design Week is a beast of two faces: a huge trade fair at the Rho Fiera Milano on the outskirts of the city, and a series of Fuorisalone art, design and fashion oriented events and openings that take place citywide, particularly in the Brera and Tortona districts.

 

April 20 – November 24

Venice’s Art Biennale returns under the stewardship of Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa. Before it opens to the public on 20 April, the world’s art media, collectors, galleristi and well-connected civilians descend on the lagoon city for the three-day vernissage (April 17-19), a mad whirl of openings that makes Art Basel Miami look like… well, Art Basel Miami. Among the off-Biennale Venice exhibits we’re most looking forward to in this edition of the biannual event is Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s I Am Hymns of the New Temples at Palazzo Grimani, a show which revolves around a film Shawky made inside the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in the summer of 2022, a still from which opens this post. Also running concurrently with the Biennale: Pierre Huyghe at Punta della Dogana and Julie Mehretu at Palazzo Grassi, Jean Cocteau at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Willem de Kooning at the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

 

June 6 – July 14

The 67^th edition of Spoleto’s Festival dei Due Mondi, Italy’s premier dance, theatre and classical music festival, will present, among other treats, a brand-new production of Christoph Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice.

 

July 12 – September 7

The Italian opera scene this year will be dominated by the great Giacomo Puccini on the hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death in 1924. Verona’s open-air Arena Opera Festival (June 8 – September 7) begins with a restaging of Franco Zeffirelli’s legendary production of Turandot, while on 29 October, at La Scala in Milan, Riccardo Chailly conducts a programme of Puccini faves featuring soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Jonas Kaufmann. True Puccini afficionados should head however to the festival which for the last 70 years has been dedicated to celebrating the master’s work: the Puccini Festival in the musician’s buen retiro of Torre del Lago near Viareggio.

 

August 28 – September 9

The Venice Film Festival – famed in recent years for its knack at launching top-drawer Oscar contenders like Poor Things, The Power of the Dog and Nomadland – plays out as always on the Lido, a sleepy suburb that for ten days of the year becomes celebrity central.

 

September 27 – February 2

Leading Florentine exhibition space Palazzo Strozzi dedicates its fall-winter 2024 show, ‘Painting Without Rules’, to US abstractionist Helen Frankenthaler

 

Photo

Wael Shawky, I Am Hymns of the New Temples, 2023

video still

Courtesy Ministero della Cultura - Archaeological Park of Pompeii, in the context of Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters

© Wael Shawky