FIREWORKS. Ileana Sonnabend and the Boom in Contemporary Art

 Millions of artists create; only a few thousand are discussed or accepted by spectators, and far fewer still are consecrated by posterity. 

Marcel Duchamp 

A stylized explosion, sharp rays cutting through space, primary colours, halftone dots: the image chosen for FIREWORKSbelongs to Roy Lichtenstein's visual universe. It is not a depiction of a firework, but an explosion translated into the language of comic strips, one of the devices through which Pop Art removed images from their ordinary function and transformed them into objects of aesthetic reflection. It is an image that precisely introduces the exhibition's subject: the moment when contemporary art burst into the cultural system, radically reshaping its codes, hierarchies and boundaries. 

Sonnabend did not limit herself to acquiring artworks or building a collection. Through the galleries in Paris, Geneva and New York, run together with her husband Michael Sonnabend and, from the late 1960s onwards, with the collaboration of her adopted son Antonio Homem Sonnabend, she actively contributed to the construction of a network of relationships between artists, cities, languages and audiences. Her work was also an exercise in selection and presentation: deciding whom to exhibit, where, in what context and alongside whom meant directly intervening in the geography of art. 

The European and American trajectory retraced by the exhibition tells precisely this story. In Paris, Sonnabend presented artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Bruce Nauman, as well as leading figures in Italian artistic research, including Giorgio Griffa, Giovanni Anselmo and Michelangelo Pistoletto. In New York, she helped introduce Giulio Paolini, Mario Merz, Georg Baselitz, Gilbert & George, Luigi Ontani and Jannis Kounellis. This was not simply a matter of importing trends, but of a reciprocal exchange: Europe and the United States were not separate centres, but places of cross-pollination that would alter the course of contemporary art. 

The exhibition, spread across eight rooms on the piano nobile of Palazzo Esposizioni, brings together more than fifty works from the Sonnabend Collection Foundation in New York, the Sonnabend Collection Mantua and other public and private collections. Thirty-five artists form a panorama spanning Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Arte Povera and more recent practices, extending as far as Neo-Geo. The resulting constellation presents the works not merely as testimonies to artistic movements, but as traces of a specific idea of contemporaneity: one that recognizes hybridization, discontinuity and the questioning of traditional categories as the very conditions of artistic research. 

Among the works on display are Figure 8 by Jasper Johns, Wall Explosion II by Roy Lichtenstein, Nine Jackies by Andy Warhol and Kite by Robert Rauschenberg. Each, in its own way, demonstrates how an image can be stripped of its apparent familiarity and returned to the viewer as a question. The language of advertising and the media, seriality, everyday objects, gesture, material and space become tools for interrogating what had until then been considered art and what had remained outside its boundaries. The revolution does not simply consist in introducing new subjects, but in changing the rules through which an image is produced, viewed and recognized. 

In this sense, Sonnabend's identity is inseparable from the works she championed. Her collecting was neither a practice of accumulation nor the private gesture of someone who owns what others desire. Rather, it was a form of cultural intervention: an activity capable of influencing the fate of artworks, their circulation and the very possibility of their being understood. From this perspective, the gallery is not a neutral space in which art is simply displayed. It is a site where value is produced, where comparisons are made and legitimacy is established, and where what a given era is prepared to recognize as innovative is also defined. 

This is where FIREWORKS enters into dialogue with the Sonnabend Collection, on permanent display at Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua since 2025, a project to which Fucknews.art had already devoted attention. The two initiatives do more than share the same provenance: they offer complementary opportunities to examine the same story. In Mantua, the collection has found a permanent home within a historic building, entering into a relationship with the city's memory and historical layers; in Rome, the temporary exhibition broadens the perspective, reconstructing the network of choices, encounters and international exchanges that made the collection possible. On the one hand, permanence; on the other, the reconstruction of a history in motion. In both cases, what emerges is the role of a woman who did not simply follow her time, but helped define its vocabulary. 

The title Fireworks can therefore be read without mistaking its image for a literal representation. Lichtenstein's explosion is already a constructed image, a sign that stages energy and noise through an artificial, explicitly media-driven visual grammar. Its strength lies precisely in the transformation of an event into a language. Similarly, the boom in contemporary art was neither a spontaneous phenomenon nor a natural succession of masterpieces: it came about through individual intuitions, gallerists' choices, exhibition strategies, international relationships and institutions capable of recognizing and consolidating what had initially appeared unfamiliar. 

The exhibition thus reminds us that art history is written not only by artists and their works, but also by those who create the conditions that allow them to be seen. Ileana Sonnabend belongs to this second history, less conspicuous but no less decisive. Her legacy lies not only in what she collected: above all, it concerns the way she learned to look, discerning in the present what had the potential to transform the future. 

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms. 

Roy Lichtenstein 

Exhibition Information 

FIREWORKS. Ileana Sonnabend and the Boom in Contemporary Art
Curated by Mario Codognato
Venue: Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, Via Nazionale 194, 00184 Rome
Dates: 3 November 2026 – 4 April 2027 

The exhibition is promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, co-organized by the Municipality of Mantua and presented in collaboration with the Sonnabend Collection Foundation New York and Marsilio Arte. 

The catalogue, published by Marsilio Arte, is edited by Mario Codognato and includes texts by the curator, Giorgia Gastaldon, Mirta d’Argenzio and Eduardo Cicelyn. 

Opening Hours 

·       Tuesday–Sunday: 10:00 am–8:00 pm 

·       Monday: closed 

·       Last admission: one hour before closing. 

Tickets
From 3 November 2026 to 31 January 2027, while the Richard Avedon and FIREWORKS exhibitions are both on view: 

·       Full price: €15 

·       Reduced: €12 

·       Young visitors aged 7 to 18: €7 

·       Open ticket: €19 

Reduced rates are available for visitors up to 26 years of age, adults over 65, practising teachers, pre-booked groups, law enforcement and military personnel, as well as holders of eligible discount agreements. Free admission is available for children up to 6 years of age, visitors with disabilities and one accompanying person, visitors with certified disabilities and one accompanying person, national tourist guides, ICOM and ICROM cardholders, and PER Card holders. 

Guided Tours 

·       Saturdays at 5:30 pm 

·       Sundays and public holidays at 12:30 pm 

·       Cost: €5, in addition to the admission ticket. For PER Card holders: €4. 

Groups and Schools 

·       Schools: €5 per student, Tuesday to Friday. 

·       Groups: €12 per person Tuesday to Friday; €15 on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. 

·       Mandatory group booking fee: €36. 

·       Mandatory school booking fee: €24 (minimum 10, maximum 25 participants). 

·       Pre-booked guided tours: €120 for groups; €96 for schools (minimum 10, maximum 25 participants). 

Group and school bookings: [email protected]. 

Contacts and Information
Palazzo Esposizioni Roma
Via Nazionale 194, 00184 Rome
Tel. +39 06 696271
Website: www.palazzoesposizioniroma.it 

Palaexpo Press Office 

·       Piergiorgio Paris: +39 06 69627 1206 – [email protected] 

·       Federica Mariani: +39 366 6493235 – [email protected] 

·       Adele Della Sala: +39 366 4435942 – [email protected] 

·       Secretariat, Dario Santarsiero: +39 06 69627 1205 – [email protected] 

·       [email protected] 

Sonnabend Collection Mantua / Marsilio Arte 

·       Giovanna Ambrosano: [email protected] 

·       [email protected] 

 

 

A Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, FIREWORKS racconta Ileana Sonnabend e il suo ruolo decisivo nella diffusione dell’arte contemporanea, tra Pop Art, Minimalismo e Arte Povera. 

At Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, FIREWORKS explores Ileana Sonnabend’s decisive role in shaping contemporary art, from Pop Art and Minimalism to Arte Povera.