Contemporary art, from Perugia to Gubbio: Umbria pays tribute to Mimmo Paladino

Umbria pays tribute to Mimmo Paladino (Paduli, BN, 1948), one of the most internationally renowned and acclaimed figures in Italian contemporary art. Paladino, in turn, pays tribute to Umbria, its traditions, and its extraordinary landscapes, through a series of initiatives resulting from the collaboration between the National Museums of Perugia - Regional Directorate of National Museums of Umbria, the Municipality of Perugia, and the Perugia Foundation. From November 8 to January 18, 2026, three of the most prestigious museums in Umbria's national circuit—the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria in Perugia, the Rocca Albornoz in Spoleto, and the Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio—will host a comprehensive retrospective of Mimmo Paladino's work, curated by Costantino D'Orazio, Director of the National Museums of Perugia, and Aurora Roscini Vitali, art historian at the National Museums of Perugia, along with the artist himself. Featuring over sixty works from Italian and international collections, some of which have been exhibited only once and never shown again by the artist, the exhibition presents a historical-critical narrative of Mimmo Paladino's entire creative journey. This narrative, on the one hand, highlights the complexity of his poetics over the course of more than fifty years of activity, from the 1970s to the present day, and on the other, clearly presents some of the key turning points in his career. The project benefited from the full collaboration of the Maestro, who made his archives available and personally participated in the development of the exhibition, which combines chronological and scholarly criteria with juxtapositions that combine rigor and evocative appeal. To facilitate the visit, the three venues will have a single ticket (€15), allowing the public to admire the works and installations at a special price. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book published by Gli Ori, featuring contributions from international critics and curators, including Norman Rosenthal and Rudi Fuchs. Within the GNU spaces, a significant portion of the exhibition is dedicated to works from the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular focus on large-scale works and material painting, which uses elements and materials outside of pictorial tradition to the point of invading the space. After listening to Paladino's words in a video created specifically for the Gallery's immersive room, the exhibition opens with a re-edition of a wall painting: Brazil, we know, is a planet painted on the wall, brought to life by students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia. In 1978, after moving to Milan, Paladino created a composition of brightly colored geometric shapes for the Galleria Toselli. It presented itself as a modern "fresco" and offered a clear response to the dematerialization of artwork, the tendency toward abandonment of traditional media, and the "tyranny of the idea" that had characterized the art scene of the 1970s. Mural painting, with its bright tints and floating forms, was destined to disappear; and in the exhibition, this episode is deliberately documented as indicative of the artist's many early environmental works. The exhibition continues with a seminal work in Paladino's career: Silenzioso (1977, private collection), a large pastel on canvas paper in which the artist imagines a man dozing on a bench while a veritable explosion of signs emerges from his unconscious. The reference is immediate to several installations from that period, which played on the unexpected and suspended appearance of small figures, lines, and drawings. From this cycle belongs the stretcherless canvas that Paladino exhibited only once at the Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan in 1978, an Untitled featuring signs that hark back to his dreamlike universe, in a progressive transition from conceptual art to figurative painting. Also connected to these environmental compositions is the extremely rare work on glass, The Garden of Forking Paths (1977, Schaufler Foundation, Sindelfingen), a fragile and gilded interpretation of Jorge Luis Borges's eponymous story, to which Paladino dedicated a series of installations, combining drawing and photography, the latter medium gradually being abandoned. In 1977, Paladino had meanwhile painted Silent, I Retire to Paint a Picture (Private Collection, Milan), the focus of the first part of the exhibition. The canvas is considered a declaration of intent, shaping the course of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy. In a climate dominated by conceptualist and minimalist restrictions, the artist chose to isolate himself and slowly and wordlessly "return" to the act of painting. The work rises to the level of a manifesto of a new cultural climate, linked to manual skill and the use of the most traditional tools of the trade. Paladino feels that his formal world can thrive by moving between diverse sources, freely drawing inspiration from his reference models and ignoring the categorical exclusion of the past. The image, vaguely Matisse-like in tone, was exhibited at the Galleria Giorgio Persano in Turin in what has been called a camera picta, a collection of graffiti that the painter executed on the ceiling and walls, substantiating the need for an internalized practice capable of once again transcending the surrounding space. This masterpiece is part of a series of small and medium-sized paintings where the artist uses oil paint with great freedom. Another example of this is EN DE RE (Private collection, Milan), created in the same year for his daughter Ginestra, a small postcard that suggests an enigma or an unsolvable puzzle, while remaining halfway between painting and real object.

Paladino's renewed interest in painting took on a highly complex form, culminating in the creation of vast monochromatic fields in the late 1970s, albeit playing with transparencies, glazes, and varying densities. The artist worked on these by adding extra-pictorial elements to the edges of the canvas: a papier-mâché and cardboard mask in Stregato/Stregatto (Private collection, Milan); an iron rod recovered from a blacksmith's workshop in A Napoli dopo gennaio (Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea), presented by Lucio Amelio in 1978. The overflowing of the painting from the edges of the canvas and the use of extremely varied materials – aspects in which the link with the previous generation, the influence of Arte Povera and the incredible effect experienced by the young Paladino when faced with the neo-Dada choices at the 1964 Biennale are most clearly recognized – is an aspect explored in the second part of the exhibition: the use of twisted iron, with drawing qualities, in Selvatico, Selvaggio (Private collection, Ravenna) and A mano calda, gambol crab (Emilio e Luisa Marinoni Collection, Lurago Marinone); in the canvases placed on the ground, such as in Tropico (1979, Sammlung FER Collection, Laupheim) and in Selvatico (Galleria In-Arco, Turin); in the threadlike nature of With Two Fingers (Nouveau Musée National, Monaco), overflowing in a three-dimensional sense; in Flashing (1979, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art), presented at “Aperto 80”, an edition of the Biennale curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. Thus began the season of the Transavanguardia. In Paladino's world, the traversal of artistic history, the return to figuration and the “nomadism” with respect to cultural models translates into a substantially libertarian expressive attitude and the conjugation of references in an anti-hierarchical and syncretic form. His imagery, full of presences, signs and recursive formulas (such as branches, hands, faces, crosses and shoes), brings together the Mediterranean and Africa, Italic symbols and Latin American legacies, ancient Egypt and the Etruscan world, pre-Roman civilizations and primitive art, Samnium and Christian culture, even the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Consider works such as Grande Cabalist (1981, Private Collection, Bologna), L'artifice tra il vento e il fuoco threatens the caves (1982, Private Collection, Reggio Emilia), Poem at the Gates of Belem (1982, Collezione d'Ercole, Rome), and Le Tane di Napoli (1983, Private Collection, Berlin). In contrast to the technologically advanced and dematerialized world, Paladino always favors visuality and evocation. His very large-format oils on canvas (Vespero, 1984, Fondazione Cariverona, Verona; Stabat Mater, Sammlung Klüser, Munich) compose a mise en scène that hints at rites, idolatrous presences, and primordial elements. Throughout the 1980s, the artist continued to uninterruptedly experiment with objects, both in painting and sculpture (Film 1953, 1985, Paone-Kiton Collection, Naples; Film, 1985, Private Collection, Milan; Untitled, Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris). The striking geometries of the Non sarà titolo series (Gian Enzo Sperone Collection, Lugano) reveal some of the leitmotifs of Paladino's poetics over the following decades: the presence of figural sculpture, the use of gold as an element of abstraction and reflection on the theme of the icon, the idea of ​​fragmentation and eurhythmic recomposition of the particular within the whole, aspects still evident in his more recent works. Paladino's tireless exploration of humanity finds its culmination in the beautiful, unpublished tondo Ni mas, ni menos, from 1988 (Emilio Mazzoli Collection, Modena), placed like a chisel and a temporal short circuit at the end of the Sala Podiani. The journey continues ideally within the permanent collection of the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, with the work D'apres Beato Angelico in Room 10 of the Gallery. In the absence of the panels composing the Guidalotti Polyptych, on display at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Paladino has once again explored the theme of the sacred icon, the frame, and the overflow of matter beyond two-dimensionality (as in Stabat Mater and Cuore di Russia, two works on loan from the MART, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rovereto). Like an artist of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the artist works within constraints and "on commission", changing the saints' clothes, the landscapes of the predella and the iconographic multiplicity of the lateral compartments in a contemporary key.

To provide the most comprehensive presentation of Mimmo Paladino's work, with a view to strengthening Umbria's national museum network and fostering dialogue between its various venues, the retrospective continues in two other locations: the Rocca Albornoz in Spoleto and the Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio. In Spoleto, the theme of sculpture dominates. The Salone d'Onore hosts the moving installation Senza titolo (2006), where the theme of geometry appears filtered through a stronger anthropological and existential context. The aluminum elements are the remains of the wooden sculptures used during the filming of Quijote; once burned for script purposes, the fragments were then melted down and repositioned in this new rhythmic system, equally dreamlike and dramatic. In the Salone Antonini, however, the Sleepers silently occupy all the available space, oblivious to the fragments of the Maestro delle Palazze's fresco and the large inscription that dominates the wall: "Everything is over. It's over." The sculptural group was first conceived at the Fonte delle Fate in Poggibonsi in 1988, with pieces later cast in bronze and made permanent. In 1999, the installation conquered the basement of London's Roundhouse, a space rendered fascinating by its very history and circular architecture, with red brick tunnels arranged radially. Like "sound sculptures," Brian Eno's music accompanies the vision of the terracotta figures, each locked in their own slumber. The same sound-image coupling is recreated, in an immersive and enveloping dimension. Gubbio hosts some particularly significant works from the last two decades. A rather deliberate choice was to include two works that use paper as a support: 1799 (2009), whose sheets of paper, with heads and faces, are folded and fitted into a ladder, reminiscent of Arte Povera; 33 Canti (2016), which also features interlocking sheets of paper, but to form a dance of human apparitions, between light and shadow. This also indirectly references the artist's impressive graphic corpus. Paladino's anti-symbolic universe has remained intact over the years, articulating an alphabet that does not refer to precise meanings: the presence of numbers, like a personal cabala (Untitled, 2007, Christian Stein Collection, Milan); the introduction of branches, light and ethereal offshoots of many works (Untitled, 2016, Cardi Collection, Milan); the animal presences, within an imaginative and evocative bestiary (Mishima's dragonflies, 2021, Private Collection). The retrospective concludes with works created in 2025: the large, almost monochrome canvas featuring numbers, heads, and branches; the three "doors," three canvases where the human figure, black against a gold background, is set within a trilithic scheme in intense red, architectural and, in some ways, "perspective." On its surface, forms and signs hint at the boundless depth of the artist's figurative, material, and chromatic universe. Confirming the profound connection between Umbria's national museums and local communities, Mimmo Paladino's exhibition provides an opportunity to create several new urban interventions, realized thanks to the collaboration between the Municipality of Perugia, the Perugia Foundation, and the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria. Since the end of June, the work "Concerto in Piazza" (Concert in the Square), conceived by the maestro to adorn the construction site of the Fondazione Perugia building in the coming months, has been installed on the façade of Palazzo Baldeschi. This tribute to Umbrian traditions, revisited with a contemporary twist, is already attracting considerable attention and widespread praise among residents and tourists visiting the city. The canvas will inspire the artistic illuminations that will illuminate Corso Vannucci for the first time during the Christmas season. The colors of the signs designed by Paladino will alternate along the street between Piazza della Repubblica and Piazza IV Novembre, conveying the festive yet proud attitude that characterizes the Umbrian community through the lens of one of the world's most acclaimed Italian artists. For the occasion, a book will be published illustrating all the exhibitions and urban interventions, thanks also to texts by the curators and some international figures, such as Norman Rosenthal and Rudi Fuchs, as well as an interview with Paladino by Laura Smith, director of collections and exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield (Yorkshire).