December 17, 2024

The must-see exhibitions in Florence

All the must-see events

All the must-see art events in Florence:

Helen Frankenthaler at Palazzo Strozzi (until Jan. 26, 2025)

Palazzo Strozzi presents the largest retrospective ever organized in Italy dedicated to one of the most revolutionary artists of the 20th century. It is an in-depth overview of Helen Frankenthaler's output, placing her works in dialogue with those of contemporary artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, David Smith, Anthony Caro and Anne Truitt. The exhibition offers a journey through large canvases, works on paper and sculptures, building a path that enhances the artist's extraordinary originality.

Impressionisti in Normandia al Museo degli Innocenti (fino al 4 maggio 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.

Michelangelo e il Potere at Palazzo Vecchio (until 26 January 2025)

An exhibition curated by Cristina Acidini and Sergio Risaliti that takes place on the second floor of Palazzo Vecchio, between the Sala delle Udienze and the Sala dei Gigli. More than fifty works: sculptures, paintings, drawings, autograph letters and plaster casts chosen to illustrate Michelangelo's relationship with power, his political vision and his determination to put himself on a par with the powerful of the earth. The design and direction of the exhibition are by architect Guido Ciompi, in collaboration with architect Gianluca Conte of Guido Ciompi & partners.

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.

Oltrecittà. Utopie e realtà. Da Le Corbusier a Gerhard Richter (until Jan. 19, 2025)

From September 26 to January 19, 2025, at Villa Bardini, the unprecedented exhibition OltreCittà. Utopias and Reality. From Le Corbusier to Gerhard Richter. Fondazione CR Firenze and Generali - Valore Cultura are launching a reflection on the macro-theme of cities that does not propose an ideal and future vision of urban centers but gives back a wide space to be able to still conceive it on a human scale. In the exhibition, curated by Lucia Fiaschi, Bruno Corà, Silvia Mantovani and Claudia Bucelli, the work Firenze III/XII by Gerhard Richter, today among the most influential artists in the international arena, is shown for the first time in an exhibition, translating the idea of the movement and dynamism of a city - Florence - that dematerializes before our eyes, as if we were observing it from the window of a train, to become something else.

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.