A Phenomenology of Laughter as the Counterfield of the Tragic
This is not merely an exhibition, but a device for interpretation.
Tragicomica. Perspectives on Italian Art from the Postwar Period to the Present presents itself as the most extensive survey ever undertaken by MAXXI on contemporary Italian art, but above all as an operation of critical displacement of its own narrative.
Tragicomica. Perspectives on Italian Art from the Postwar Period to the Present presents itself as the most extensive survey ever undertaken by MAXXI on contemporary Italian art, but above all as an operation of critical displacement of its own narrative.
Produced in collaboration with the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and curated by Andrea Bellini and Francesco Stocchi, the exhibition brings together more than 130 artists and 300 works, articulating a trajectory that spans over eighty years. Yet what is at stake is not a simple historical sequence: it is a stance, a perceptual tonality, an attitude that runs through Italian culture and that Giorgio Agamben has defined as a “stubborn anti-tragic intention.”
This intention does not merely neutralize the tragic: it displaces it, skirts around it, refracts it through the comic, transforming it into a field of ambiguity in which meaning is not resolved but suspended. It is here that the genealogy evoked by the exhibition takes shape: one that finds in Dante’s Commedia not only a literary antecedent, but an epistemological matrix. To confront the abyss through the everyday, to transfigure pain into a shareable narrative, to contaminate the elevated with the low: it is within this gap that a specifically Italian mode of inhabiting the world emerges.
The Origin: A Bifacial Gesture
“I am a saint.”
“I am a scoundrel.”
“I am a scoundrel.”
In the double inscription that traverses the surface and reverse of a canvas by Lucio Fontana, an originary gesture is enacted: not a self-definition, but a fracture. The artist presents himself as contradiction, as a figure split between aspiration and degradation, elevation and سقوط.
This self-portrait, both ironic and violent, does not merely inaugurate a poetics: it establishes a field of tension that the exhibition adopts as its point of departure. The tragicomic emerges here, in this impossibility of coinciding with a unified identity.
A Logic of Displacement
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.
— Charlie Chaplin
— Charlie Chaplin
The temporal span of the exhibition—from the postwar period to the present—is not organized according to a reassuring linearity, but disarticulated into constellations. Artists are not arranged along a chronology, but placed in relation through short circuits, resonances, and interferences.
What emerges is a counter-narrative of Italian art: not a canon, but its destabilization; not an ordered history, but a stratified and intermittent texture. Within this space, irony is never an escape: it is a critical device that fractures every form of stability.
Among the artists brought into dialogue—from Gianfranco Baruchello to Elena Bellantoni, from Alighiero Boetti to Maurizio Cattelan, from Piero Manzoni to Giuseppe Penone to Mario Schifano—there unfolds a field in which laughter appears as an ambiguous gesture: at times liberating, at times cruel, always destabilizing.
The project extends beyond the visual arts, engaging cinema, literature, philosophy, theatre, design, and architecture, thanks to a scientific committee composed of Andrea Cortellessa, Davide Oberto, Annalisa Sacchi, Elettra Stimilli, and Giovanna Zapperi. A catalogue published by Marsilio and an extensive public program complete the framework.
The Museum as a Site of Tension
In the words of Maria Emanuela Bruni, the tragicomic reveals the oscillatory structure of existence: a dynamic in which happiness and suffering do not exclude one another, but mutually imply each other. Sixteen years after its opening, the museum here assumes the task of traversing seventy years of Italian cultural production without resolving its contradictions.
For Francesco Stocchi, narrating Italian art means confronting a field inherently resistant to stable categorization. The tragicomic thus becomes a lens capable of restoring the vitality of this instability: a mode through which art continuously negotiates its relationship with the tragic.
Andrea Bellini, finally, insists on the need to articulate a more complex vision of Italian cultural production, capable of traversing languages and disciplines, and of restoring an imaginary that is constantly being redefined.
The Exhibition Path: A Dramaturgy of Disorientation
The exhibition opens with the dialogue between Lucio Fontana and Elena Bellantoni, alongside Artist’s Shit by Piero Manzoni: a threshold in which art presents itself as an act of desacralization.
From here, the space unfolds as a sequence of perceptual displacements:
the animated portraits by Simone Berti, La Nona Ora by Maurizio Cattelan—where power appears in its fragility—and the installations by Roberto Cuoghi, which transform monumentality into grotesque excess.
the animated portraits by Simone Berti, La Nona Ora by Maurizio Cattelan—where power appears in its fragility—and the installations by Roberto Cuoghi, which transform monumentality into grotesque excess.
The path moves through environments that destabilize body and perception: Bariestesia by Gianni Colombo, the suspended, fairy-tale atmospheres of Chiara Fumai, and the accumulation of images and narratives in 25,000 Covid Jokesby Paola Pivi.
In the second section, the space becomes denser:
the works of Giuseppe Penone interrogate the continuity between the natural and the artificial, while Gilberto Zorio explores the alchemical transformation of language.
the works of Giuseppe Penone interrogate the continuity between the natural and the artificial, while Gilberto Zorio explores the alchemical transformation of language.
At the center, Novecento by Maurizio Cattelan suspends the animal body in an ambiguous state between monumentality and ruin.
Language becomes flesh in Alfabeto officinale A–Z by Tomaso Binga, while the works of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Emilio Isgrò interrogate identity as an unstable construction.
The final constellation—from Mirella Bentivoglio to Ketty La Rocca, culminating in the Pinocchio figures by Mario Ceroli—returns an image of the human as a process in becoming: metamorphosis, disobedience, invention.
The Comic as Category
Comedy is tragedy seen from behind.
— Mario Monicelli
— Mario Monicelli
In his essay, Andrea Bellini traces the theoretical genesis of the project to his encounter with the thought of Giorgio Agamben.
Dante’s decision to title his poem Commedia becomes here the paradigm of a cultural logic: no longer the fall of the innocent (tragedy), but the journey of the guilty toward a possible redemption.
It is within this shift that a specifically Italian condition is defined: a relationship with the tragic that never fully resolves into absoluteness, but is constantly diverted, ironized, and rendered porous.
Public Program: The Tragicomic as Diffused Practice
The exhibition extends into a program of talks, screenings, and readings that traverse multiple languages.
A series curated by Andrea Cortellessa brings together visual artists, poets, and writers, while the film program curated by Davide Oberto retraces Italian cinema as a space of oscillation between irony and drama: from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Federico Fellini, up to Massimo Troisi.
The program runs from April to September at MAXXI, with free admission subject to availability.
On September 16, Antonella Moscati will engage in dialogue with Elettra Stimilli on illness as a daily experience suspended between anxiety and irony: a territory in which the comic and the unsettling coincide.
April 2, 2026 — September 20, 2026
Rome, MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts
