Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Marco Lodola, Umberto Postal, Plumcake

Curated by Margherita de Pilati and Ivan Quaroni, the exhibition explores how, over the past forty years, a significant strand of Italian art has chosen to work seemingly “against its own time”, establishing an irregular, intermittent, or deliberately anachronistic relationship with history. Since the 1980s, many artists have developed forms of temporality that are out of sync with the present.

In the age of digital technology and the perpetual present, this suspension has become a widespread condition: works that belong fully neither to yesterday nor to today occupy an intermediate territory, where iconographic memory is continuously reassembled, interrupted, or slowed down. Through returns to painting, iconographic revivals, and temporal suspensions, the works outline a space in which past and present coexist dynamically, offering new perspectives on recent artistic production.

Following the conceptual art season, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the emergence of the Transavanguardia, which brought painting and figuration back to the forefront. Artists such as Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino reintroduced narrative, myth, and the archaic—not as an expression of nostalgia, but as the reactivation of an iconographic repertoire deeply embedded in Italy’s cultural memory.
This shift was followed by the experience of the Anachronists, who engaged with the past even more explicitly: a return to form, classical composition, and a style of painting that seems to belong to another era. Among the key figures are Stefano Di Stasio, Omar Galliani, Paola Gandolfi, and the outsider Carlo Maria Mariani.

The exhibition continues with a selection of postmodern experiences: the Nuovi-nuovi, represented by well-known artists such as Salvo, Luigi Ontani, and Aldo Mondino, whose work anticipates that of the Nuovi Futuristi. The latter, including Marco Lodola, Umberto Postal, Innocente, and Plumcake, developed a Pop-inspired visual language that drew on advertising, design, and mass culture. Through painting, objects, and environmental installations, Nuovo Futurismo is characterised by an immediate, ironic, and self-aware approach that reflects a world increasingly shaped by the media and the circulation of images and signs. Rather than explaining reality, these works move through it, transforming everyday visual codes into experiences that continue to question the role of art in a society already profoundly defined by visual culture.

Within these recurring stylistic and visual cycles, many artists engage directly with history, as Paolo Ventura and Max Rohr do, or with the very notion of time, as in the work of Andrea Mastrovito and Giulia Andreani. Others revisit sacred iconography, a defining feature of Nicola Samorì’s practice, while Francesco Vezzoli reinterprets classical myth.
The dialogue with traditional pictorial genres also proves especially fruitful: Guglielmo Castelli focuses on portraiture, while Nicola Nannini, Fulvio Di Piazza, and Andrea Di Marco turn to landscape painting.
The influence of art history also shapes the work of the youngest generation of artists, represented by Giuditta Branconi, Chiara Calore, and Martina Cinotti, whose paintings bring the exhibition to its conclusion. If you need this for an exhibition catalogue or museum wall text, I can also adapt it to a more polished curatorial English style.