February 25, 2025

The must-see exhibitions in Florence

All the must-see events

All the must-see art events in Florence.

Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude (March 16-July 20)

Palazzo Strozzi's new exhibition explores Tracey Emin's multifaceted work that spans painting, drawing, video, photography and sculpture. The title refers to two key words, sex and loneliness, which permeate the more than 60 works in a journey through different moments of the artist's career, in an intense journey on the themes of the body and desire, love and sacrifice.

Thomas J Price in Florence (14 March - 11 June)

Thomas J. Price, known for his monumental figurative sculptures, explores the psychology of his characters and the value of the individual, subverting hierarchies. The exhibition designed for the rooms of the Palazzo Vecchio features sculptural works of varying scales set up inside the museum. Also central to the exhibition are two outdoor bronzes, one in the courtyard of the Museo Novecento and a 3.6-meter-high gilded sculpture that dialogues with historical works in Piazza della Signoria.

Caravaggio e il Novecento. Roberto Longhi, Anna Banti (27 March - 20 July)

A fascinating journey to rediscover a couple - he an art historian, she a writer and translator - who brought together a coterie of artists and intellectuals who shaped the Italian 20th century and beyond. The itinerary that unfolds at Villa Bardini also includes a Silent Room where the eyes and mind can rest overwhelmed by the suggestions and stimuli offered in the 12 rooms in which the exhibition unfolds.

Impressionisti in Normandia al Museo degli Innocenti (until 4 May 2025)

Impressionists in Normandy is the exhibition with which the Museo degli Innocenti celebrates this anniversary, through a unique narrative that opens with an exceptional loan from the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome: Claude Monet's Pink Water Lilies. Alongside the Water Lilies, over 70 works tell the story of the Impressionist current from its beginnings so closely linked to Normandy, a land that - for its landscapes, light and colours - became a point of reference for numerous artists, a true laboratory in which to experiment with the suggestions and forms of a new painting. Painters such as Monet, Renoir, Delacroix and Courbet - on show along with many others - captured the immediacy and vitality of the Normandy landscape, imprinting on canvas the moods of the sky, the sparkle of the water and the verdant valleys of that stage of rare beauty that became, not by chance, the cradle of Impressionism.

Marion Baruch. Un passo avanti tanti dietro (15 March - 8 June)

At the Museo Novecento the largest retrospective in an Italian institution to the great cosmopolitan artist born in Timisoara in 1929. The exhibition allows the visitor to retrace her activity, thanks to the presence of works emblematic of her multifaceted path, from the first works of the late 1950s to collaborations with well-known designers, from participatory works to fabric works made after the year two thousand.

Messaggere (March 8-June 8)

At the same time as Marion Baruch's monographic exhibition, the ground-floor rooms of the Museo Novecento, historically reserved for the nourishment of the soul and body of the nuns who lived in the Leopoldine complex, welcome the work of a new generation of women artists: Chiara Baima Poma, Fatima Bianchi, Lucia Cantò, Parul B. Thacker and Tuli Mekondjo. The artists, diverse in their backgrounds, training and modes of expression, are united by a quest that draws on the deepest feelings of humankind. Through recently produced works and site-specific interventions designed specifically for the Museo Novecento, the exhibition allows for an investigation into the relationship between art and spirituality, establishing an unprecedented dialogue between very distant practices.

La Sala Grande. Giorgio Vasari per Cosimo I de' Medici (until March the 9th 2025)

In the setting of Palazzo Vecchio, until March 9th, the exhibition La Sala Grande. Giorgio Vasari for Cosimo I de' Medici is on display, celebrating the historical and artistic grandeur of the Sala Grande on the anniversary of the deaths of Cosimo I de' Medici and Giorgio Vasari. The exhibition, set up in the Sala Grande - today better known as the Salone dei Cinquecento—tells the story of the room's renovation through letters, preparatory sketches, and unique testimonies. Additionally, the exhibition features works of artistic craftsmanship by master Paolo Penko and a video production by Art Media Studio that connects the displayed works to the frescoes of the room.

Retroscena. Storie di resistenza e dissidenza nella collezione della ragione at Museo del Novecento (until April 2)

About eighty years after our country's struggle for liberation from Nazi-Fascism, the Museo Novecento is questioning the presence, in the Alberto Della Ragione Collection, of evidence regarding the relationship between artists and the historical events in which they participated between the 1920s and 1940s. The fulcrum of the exhibition is the works of masters who lived through, suffered or opposed the policies of fascism, going through the dark and terrible days of war and racial laws, those of cultural persecution, and finally the civil war. Artists who were loved by Della Ragione, a sensitive collector of an art compromised with the adventures of existence, with the pain and evil of living, drawn into the uprisings of resistance and rebellion to the darkest destiny of man and societies. Some of them, Mario Mafai, Antonietta Raphaël, Renato Guttuso, were even housed in the engineer's villa near Genoa to escape the persecution of the regime. The selected works make it possible not only to investigate the choices made by the naval engineer, who established intense human as well as professional relationships with many of the artists exhibited here, but also to question the work of these protagonists of Italian art in one of the darkest seasons of our recent history.

Terra Incognita. Works of Arianna Fioratti Loreto (until 4 May)

A journey into the world of imagination in which mythical beasts and monsters come to life as if they were characters in a modern bestiary that also serves as a travel account to a mysterious island that does not exist. 70 medium- and large-scale works created especially for the Specola Museum by Arianna Fioratti Loreto.

Forme della Natura. Fotografie di Marcello Fara 2020-2021 (until 7 March)

From the arrival by ship where the island materializes in the middle of the sea among the fog to the geometries of the seascape that seeks a balance with human intervention. The sea of Sardinia is the protagonist of a journey of the eyes and feeling led by artist Marcello Fara to his homeland. Until March 7, at Villa Bardini, the photographic exhibition Forms of Nature. Photographs by Marcello Fara 2020-2021, curated by Carlo Sisi.