photo cover: Oniwakamaru sottomette una carpa gigante, Surimono Totoya Hokkei ©Museo d'Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone Genova

October 29, 2024

Art & Culture

The most beautiful exhibitions not to be missed in Tuscany

All the exhibitions to mark in your diary

Art, photography and more. Here all the most important exhibitions in the main Tuscan cities.

Florence

Here an in-depth look at all the must-see exhibitions in the city.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER AT PALAZZO STROZZI (Sept. 27-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.

MASSIMO LISTRI PHOTOGRAPHS (until Nov. 14)

It dates back to 2019, a project Massimo Listri created for Firenze made in Tuscany magazine during the initial phase of the Manifattura Tabacchi restoration work. These two images gave La to a marvelous score of 19 large-format works by the Florentine artist, including iconic and other unpublished photographs, on display precisely at Manifattura Tabacchi. A monographic itinerary that becomes an intense and rhythmic immersion in the world of Massimo Listri: beyond the spaces of Manifattura, which are shown to the public interpreted by Listri's absolute gaze imbued with history, other extraordinary places such as the Palace of Versailles, the Royal Palace of Caserta, the Vatican Apostolic Library, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Royal Palace of Naples.

OLTRECITTÀ. UTOPIE E REALTÀ. DA LE CORBUSIER A GERHARD RICHTER (through 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.

Pisa

HOKUSAI (through Feb.23, 2025)

Palazzo Blu in Pisa is hosting a major exhibition dedicated to the Japanese master HOKUSAI, from 24 October 2024 until 23 February 2025, produced and organised by Fondazione Palazzo Blu and MondoMostre, with the contribution of Fondazione Pisa. (To find out everything you don't know about Palazzo Blu, its history and past exhibitions, click here!). Through more than 200 works from the Museo d'Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone in Genoa and the Museo d'Arte Orientale in Venice, as well as from private Italian and Japanese collections, the exhibition highlights the eclecticism of the greatest master of the ukiyoe artistic strand, literally translated as images of the Floating World, which marked the apex of the development of Edo-era art (1603 - 1868) in Japan, and the richness of his legacy evident in the works of the many pupils who continued his style.

Prato

CENTRO PECCI

The first solo exhibition of one of the most fashionable and interesting emerging artists of the moment, Louis Fratino (born in 1993), an American of Italian origin, is in Prato. Until 2 February, Satura brings together works from the last decade and others of new production: a series of sculptures, over 30 paintings and more than 20 graphic works including drawings and lithographs, where one can perceive a cultural background marked by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Filippo De Pisis, Carlo Carrà and Renato Guttuso.
There are two other exhibitions this autumn-winter at the Pecci, both from 15 November to 2 February: Le signorine (Young ladies), with the works of Margherita Manzelli, who ranges from painting to performance confronting a new imagery of the female body, challenging any pre-constituted idea of representation of the subjects, and Azioni e ritratti / viaggi in Italia (Actions and portraits / trips to Italy), with the shots of Peter Hujar, one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century who, between the 1970s and 1980s, immortalised a community of people close to him who became some of the most iconic figures of American culture.

Arezzo

VASARI. IL TEATRO DELLE VIRTÙ (fino al 2 febbraio )

Until 2 February 2025 the exhibition Vasari. Il teatro delle Virtù, an event that is the highlight of the programme of Arezzo. The City of Vasari. The exhibition project, curated by Cristina Acidini in collaboration with Alessandra Baroni, emphasises the use of allegory, that is, the heritage of sacred and profane inventions put to good use by Vasari for the glory of Grand Duke Cosimo I, his protector from 1150 to his death. To represent the evocative potential of allegory, there is no shortage of highly symbolic artefacts, in particular the Chimera, an extraordinary Etruscan bronze identified with the National Archaeological Museum in Florence. The exhibition is divided into 8 thematic sections designed to comprehensively present not only Vasari's work, but also his extremely dense network of relations and the innovations of which he was the interpreter that would change the history of art forever. A special focus is devoted to the representations of the Virtues, symbolic figures intensely present in Vasari's painting and that of his time as religious, moral and territorial allegories. The section dedicated to sacred art, both public and private, culminates in the section of monumental altarpieces, works that during the last two centuries have never left their original locations and that arrive in Arezzo on an exceptional basis.

Pietrasanta

IL BALCONE DEL CIELO (through Feb 9, 2025)

In the evocative Monumental Complex of Sant'Agostino in Piazza del Duomo, Il balcone del cielo (The Balcony of Heaven), a personal anthological exhibition by Franca Pisani, an exponent of the group of leaders of ‘visual poetry’ and ‘conceptual art’, consists of ten canvases (reminiscent of the large canvases that were widespread in the Veneto region in the 16th century) of considerable size, painted on a black Caravaggio background. The sign traces and mental space show how Franca Pisani's painting has returned to colour: the yellows of Van Gogh's sunflowers shine through, like the fields of ‘her’ Maremma, the vermilion reds of sunset, the cobalt blues, the turquoise greens of the summer sea. And then there are the female figures, which belong to Franca Pisani's artistic history and which are presented on the canvases with a new appeal: to enhance the single-nave architecture of the church, whose floor is laid out on various levels that adapt to the slope of the land, ten wooden parallelepipeds have been created that will house the large canvases measuring 300 x 300 centimetres to form a sort of pathway.