The ironic dimension charged with imaginative power of Bruno Munari, the irreverence of Piero Manzoni, the vertigo of paradox of Gino De Dominicis. Irony intertwines with the political sphere with Piero Gilardi and Michelangelo Pistoletto, the challenge to female stereotypes by Tomaso Binga and Mirella Bentivoglio, the linguistic experimentation of nonsense by Adriano Spatola and Giulia Niccolai. With Maurizio Cattelan, Paola Pivi and Francesco Vezzoli the contradictory juxtaposition of subjects and situations exploits irony to reveal the inconsistencies of the present, while Chiara Fumai and Italo Zuffi with their works unmask the unwritten rules of the art system. And then again the artistic duo Eva and Franco Mattes, who, drawing on the language of memes spread massively on the Web, reveal a humorous form that characterizes the Web today.
From Feb. 6 to Sept. 7, 2025, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector presents the major group exhibition Facile ironia. Irony in Italian art between the 20th and 21st centuries, curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni.
Designed for the spaces of the Ciminiere Hall, with more than 100 works and archival documents by more than 70 artists, the exhibition spans a time span of about seventy years - from the 1950s to the present - proposing to trace the history of Italian art through the theme of irony.
Already in the ancient world with the figure of Socrates, irony is “the art of asking questions”: a completely unique tool that allows human beings to have a more lucid and disenchanted look at reality, as it is able to reveal its anomalies and contradictions. Through humorous games, parodies and witticisms, irony also becomes an antidote, a funny and witty alternative to protect human beings from what ails them.
Ironic in itself, the title of the exhibition in fact recalls the apparent simplicity of the phenomenon while revealing its intrinsic complexity. A contradiction that becomes a game in its own right and invites the audience to question the nature of language, the commonplaces that accompany it and, at the same time, the way these influence our observation and interpretation of the world around us.
Italian artists from multiple generations have shared an anti-tragic aesthetic and existential strategy that embraces the “cosmic joke” of reality.
This critical and imaginative context is recounted in the exhibition by the development of thematic macro-areas, useful in illustrating the different declinations of irony and the trans-historicity of the phenomenon: paradox, its connection to play, irony as a feminist weapon of critique of patriarchy and the Italian social order, its relation to political mobilization, irony as a form of institutional critique, as a practice of nonsense, and finally as dark humor.
The exhibition is supported by the main sponsor Gruppo Hera and is part of the institutional program of ART CITY Bologna 2025 created on the occasion of Arte Fiera.
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