Five new exhibitions to see in October in Milan

The face and the allegory [Le visage et l’allégorie]Lorenzo Bartolini | Luigi Rovati Foundation

Lorenzo Bartolini’s sculptures take place in the superb rooms of the eclectic Rovati Foundation, fully expressing the romantic experience of Italian purism.
The exhibition opens with the Piano Nobile with the marble sculpture of the Educating charityin the version created in 1846.
continues in the Weapons Room which reconstructs the complexity of the artist’s creative journey, from the form of the model to the prototypes and finally to the work.
The White Space (Spazio Bianco) welcomes the representation of the “face”, at the heart of the research and sensitivity of the Italian sculptor, who endeavored to link natural beauty to the existential beauty of the portraits represented.
Until February 16 – Corso Venezia 52

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE | Mudec

The exhibition is the first complete anthological retrospective organized in an Italian museum and famous Niki de Saint Phalle, known for her large, round and colorful Nanas.
Structured in eight sections, the exhibition recounts the artistic life of the Franco-American artist, from his beginnings to his latest works, in a diachronic but also strongly anthological rhythm which traces, through the colorful, polymorphous, rounded and maternal of his Nanas (and not only), a much less joyful personal life.
The exhibition presents 110 works, including ten large-scale works, as well as an elegant selection of clothes from the House of Dior, which also recall her past as a model.
From October 5, 2024 to February 16, 2025 – via Tortona 56

One hundred years after his birth, Milan celebrates the Milanese artist Enrico Baj (Milan, October 31, 1924 – Vergiate, June 16, 2003), one of the masters of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with a vast retrospective exhibition designed to cover all the themes and subjects of his long and multifaceted experience.
In the Lucerne Hall and the Caryatid Hall of the Palazzo Reale, the project includes nearly fifty works distilled over a period of time from the beginning of the 1950s to the dawn of the 2000s, going through research phases of the artist and his adherence to different movements over time. Its characters who have entered the common imagination, the Ladies and Generals, the Ultracorps, the Mirrors, the Furniture and the Monsters of the Apocalypse animate a ride of creatures from the surreal and science-fictional universe of a author who made irony and the grotesque a spur to debunk bourgeois conformism and take sides against all forms of constituted power.
From October 8, 2024 to February 9, 2025 – Piazza Duomo 12

Giosetta Fioroni. Speculum | M77 Gallery

The exhibition, which presents around fifty works, retraces the entire long career of the artist, born in Rome in 1932, through the theme of the gaze and the representation of feminine otherness. The exhibition is divided into three sections: WATCH (Watch) includes a series by Argenti, works created in the 1960s after a long stay in Paris, where she uses layers of enameled aluminum as the only pictorial intervention on canvas or paper, juxtaposed with pencil marks; LOOK AT YOURSELF (Look at yourself) exhibits a series of self-portraits representing different and successive moments in the artist’s career; BE WATCHED (Being looked at) exhibits a series of photographic portraits of Giosetta Fioroni taken by different authors.
Until December 21, 2024 – Via Mecenate 77 (free entry)

Dubuffet et l’Art Brut | Mudec

The exhibition, which will open its doors on October 12, traces the expressive power of Art Brut, an artistic and revolutionary vision from which many contemporary artists have been inspired. Born in the heart of post-war Paris, far from the halls of art museums and refined salons, art brut, whose definition goes back to the French artist and theorist Jean Dubuffet, represents art “without filter”.
The exhibition was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Collection de l’Art Brut de Lausanne, which has an extraordinary collection of more than 70,000 works, resulting from the core of Dubuffet’s exceptional donation to the City in 1971. Drawings , paintings, sculptures and textile works, which are still enriched today thanks to purchases and donations from new authors.
From October 12, 2024 to February 16, 2025 – via Tortona 56

Picasso, Munch, Mendini…: Exhibitions currently on the calendar in Milan.