Exhibitions to see in September in Italy From masters of photography such as Man Ray to Ian Davenport's famous color pours
September is a month that tastes of new beginnings, but also of discovery. Cities come alive again after the summer break, and Italian museums, foundations, and galleries turn into true engines of imagination. From Milan to Palermo, passing through Florence, Turin, and even the more intimate Todi, the September 2025 exhibition calendar is a mosaic of languages and perspectives: from 20th-century giants such as Man Ray, Guttuso, and Toulouse-Lautrec, to masters of contemporary photography like Jess T. Dugan and Bruno Barbey, to Anthea Hamilton’s installation experiments and Elodie Antoine’s textile sculptures. There is room for memory and for the future, for painting in dialogue with politics and for fashion as a social machine, for Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro and Ian Davenport’s chromatic pours. Every exhibition becomes a chance to travel, not only through art but also through the places that host it: historic palaces, castles, independent galleries, and villas immersed in the countryside. In September, Italy turns into a widespread itinerary to be experienced slowly, guided by the voices of artists.
Exhibitions to see in September 2025 in Italy
Man Ray - Milan
At Milan’s Palazzo Reale, the doors open wide for one of the greats of the 20th century: Man Ray. The retrospective Forms of Light, opening on September 24, is a journey into the creative laboratory of an artist who transformed photography into a poetic and subversive language. Born in Philadelphia in 1890 as Emmanuel Radnitsky, Man Ray soon moved in New York’s avant-garde circles, met Marcel Duchamp, and arrived in Paris, where he became an integral part of the Surrealist group. There, he invented new techniques, bent photography to play and ambiguity, and worked across painting, collage, cinema, and fashion, never recognizing boundaries between genres. The Milan exhibition brings together nearly 300 works: from the famous rayographs, images created without a camera, to iconic shots of Kiki de Montparnasse, and to solarizations, where bodies seem surrounded by a spectral aura. It is a thematic journey through self-portraits, muses, nudes, and fashion images, offering a complete vision of an artist who never sought technical perfection but rather the power to disorient, surprise, and provoke reflection.
Title: Man Ray. Forms of Light
When: September 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Where: Palazzo Reale, Milan
Ian Davenport - Todi
Contemporary art arrives in Umbria. Ian Davenport, one of the protagonists of the Young British Artists, brings the exhibition Holding Center to Todi’s Palazzo del Popolo, an experience that combines painting, installation, and video art. His celebrated Puddle Paintings are born from poured streams of color that accumulate into glossy, hypnotic surfaces, while his works on paper, Splats, explode in jets and chromatic splashes. His is a research into the physicality of painting, but also its ability to involve the viewer in a process that always seems in motion, never concluded. During the days of the Todi Festival, a site-specific video installation projected onto the façade of Palazzo del Capitano transforms the medieval architecture into an electronic flow of vertical lines and bands of color, offering the public a dynamic, sensory experience.
Title: Ian Davenport. Holding Center
When: Until October 5, 2025
Where: Palazzo del Popolo, Todi
Fashion and Advertising - Mamiano di Traversetolo, Parma
The Magnani-Rocca Foundation, on the outskirts of Parma, invites us on a journey that unites aesthetics, memory, and society with the exhibition Fashion and Advertising in Italy 1950–2000. Over 300 works, including posters, magazines, photographs, TV commercials, film clips, and even the legendary Fiorucci stickers, narrate half a century of transformations, when Italian fashion managed to transcend clothing to become a global language. The narrative begins in the post-war years, when graphic artists and illustrators carefully built a handmade imaginary, moves through the years of Carosello and black-and-white television, and continues into the chromatic revolutions of private TV and the 1980s and 1990s, when Made in Italy became an international myth. Photographs by Giovanni Gastel and Giampaolo Barbieri dialogue with illustrations by René Gruau and Guido Crepax, while Oliviero Toscani’s campaigns shake, provoke, and reinvent the very idea of advertising. This exhibition does not simply celebrate fashion, it reveals its nature as a cultural and social machine, capable of generating desires, stereotypes, and new identities.
Title: Fashion and Advertising in Italy 1950–2000
When: September 13 – December 14, 2025
Where: Magnani-Rocca Foundation, Villa dei Capolavori, Mamiano di Traversetolo, Parma
Elodie Antoine - Palermo
In Palermo, within the intimate spaces of In Via Cluverio Officina gallery, a world of softness and unease opens up. Belgian artist Elodie Antoine brings her textile sculptures to Italy for the first time with the exhibition Cette Obscure Clarté, creating a subtle, sensorial dialogue with works by artists Joséphine Flasseur and Célia Nkala. Her creations, crafted with techniques ranging from crochet to felt, boiled wool to embroidery, appear like living creatures colonizing the space, enveloping it with a material poetry that simultaneously attracts and unsettles. These are works not limited to being looked at, but that demand to be perceived, almost touched, immersed in a tactile landscape where light and darkness coexist. It is an experience that speaks of femininity, memory, and transformation, opening a new window onto the panorama of international contemporary sculpture. The exhibition is also the perfect occasion to visit Palermo itself, a layered, luminous, and contradictory city, which welcomes Antoine’s intimate and visionary art until September 30, 2025.
Title: Cette Obscure Clarté
When: Until September 30, 2025
Where: Via Cluverio Officina, Palermo
Renato Guttuso – Gallipoli
The halls of Gallipoli Castle are filled with the intense and passionate colors of Renato Guttuso. Curated by Lorenzo Madaro, the exhibition Mediterranean Visions brings together thirty works from private collections, offering a powerful and intimate portrait of one of the greatest Italian masters of the 20th century. From the celebrated Red Nude and Faceless Nude, which depict the body with truth and drama, to Sicilian landscapes and still lifes where the red of chili peppers, the blue of the sky, and the green of vegetation become living matter, the exhibition reveals an artist who made painting a tool of struggle and testimony. Guttuso never stopped telling reality, with an energetic stroke that combines political passion and aesthetic refinement. Gallipoli, with its indissoluble bond with the sea and Mediterranean light, becomes the ideal setting to rediscover a painter who, through his works, conveyed both the strength and fragility of an Italy in transformation. Mediterranean Visions is a tribute to an art that strikes the eye while also narrating a historical time, never losing its bond with life.
Title: Mediterranean Visions. Works by Renato Guttuso
When: until October 15, 2025
Where: Gallipoli Castle, Gallipoli
Toulouse Lautrec - Florence
From September 27, 2025, to February 22, 2026, the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence hosts Toulouse-Lautrec. A Journey into Belle Époque Paris, an exhibition that gathers over 170 works including posters, lithographs, and drawings. The show is not just a display of masterpieces. It is a total immersion into fin-de-siècle Paris, where Montmartre thrived with café-concerts, Moulin Rouge dancers, and bohemian figures who enlivened the city’s nights. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with his ironic and innovative gaze, transformed this world into art, creating posters that revolutionized advertising graphics and became icons of modernity. Alongside him, the exhibition highlights artists such as Alphonse Mucha and Jules Chéret, creating a choral portrait of the Belle Époque and the birth of Art Nouveau. Costumes, furnishings, and period photographs complete a setup that revives not only an artist but the spirit of an entire era.
Title: Toulouse-Lautrec. A Journey into Belle Époque Paris
When: September 27, 2025 – February 22, 2026
Where: Museo degli Innocenti, Florence
Bruno Barbey - Turin
On September 12, 2025, Palazzo Falletti di Barolo in Turin inaugurates Bruno Barbey. The Italians, an exhibition of around one hundred black-and-white shots that portray an Italy in transformation, which, at the beginning of the 1960s, was recovering from the wounds of war, moving toward an economic boom, yet still deeply tied to tradition. Born in Morocco in 1941 and passing away in 2020, Barbey, while still a photography student in Switzerland, traveled through Italy in a Volkswagen Beetle, capturing the country through faces and scenes of everyday life: street children, farmers, aristocrats, nuns, and beggars. Different figures, yet united by a sense of community and resilience, creating a powerful visual and anthropological fresco. The Turin exhibition offers the opportunity to rediscover an important part of our past and also includes a video made by the artist’s wife, Caroline Thiénot-Barbey, retracing the project’s genesis and turning this reportage into a timeless historical and cultural testimony.
Title: Bruno Barbey. The Italians
When: September 12, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Where: Palazzo Falletti di Barolo, Turin
Jess. T. Dugan – Milan
From September 5, 2025, Gallerie d’Italia in Milan presents Look at me like you love me – Guardami come se mi amassi, a photographic project by Jess T. Dugan exploring themes of identity, relationships, and love. The exhibition gathers 30 large-format photographs, five of which are previously unseen, along with two videos intertwining autobiographical narrative and universal reflection. Through gazes, gestures, and bodies portrayed with delicacy and vulnerability, Dugan invites viewers into an intimate and authentic dimension. In the videos Letter to My Daughter and Letter to My Father, the artist addresses the family bond as a complex space, made of both affection and conflict, confirming their ability to transform personal experiences into a collective reflection. Milan thus reaffirms itself as a capital of contemporary photography, offering a journey that combines artistic research with emotional exploration.
Title: Look at me like you love me – Guardami come se mi amassi
When: until October 19, 2025
Where: Gallerie d’Italia – Milan, Intesa Sanpaolo, Milan
Anthea Hamilton - Rome
At Fondazione Memmo, until November 2, 2025, unfolds Soft You, the first major exhibition in Rome dedicated to Anthea Hamilton. This is not simply a display of works: it creates environments, redefines spaces, and pushes the boundaries of perception. Hamilton intertwines sculpture, installation, performance, and cinema, choosing Rome as her interlocutor and Shakespeare as a distant echo (the exhibition title comes from Othello). The legs, a recurring motif in her work, become friezes, ornaments, and three-dimensional patterns dialoguing with the Eternal City and its numerical and aesthetic memory. Inside the rooms, everything vibrates with contamination: mirrored screens that amplify light, collages from the performance Othello: A Play, textile sculptures oscillating between private gesture and collective ritual, and a refined Rankaku mosaic created with Alice Rivalta. Each element is fragment and totality, surface and depth. This is not an exhibition to look at, it is one to inhabit.
Title: Soft You
When: until November 2, 2025
Where: Fondazione Memmo, Rome
Caravaggio – Sciacca
The Caravaggio exhibition in Sciacca, open until December 14, 2025, is a journey into the beating heart of the 17th century, into the theatricality of Baroque painting, into the folds of chiaroscuro that still shape our imagination. Five sections, twenty-two works, a path following Merisi through his contemporaries and heirs. From the biographical tensions that fueled his myth, with figures like Baglione and Manfredi, to the intimate lyricism of Orazio Gentileschi and Carlo Saraceni. From the theatricality of European tenebrists (Ribera, La Tour, Valentin de Boulogne) to the composed, spiritual reinterpretation of the Bolognese school with Guido Reni and Guercino. The journey becomes choral, human, dramatic: saints and sinners, martyrs and prostitutes coexist in the chiaroscuro of the soul. All leads to a climax: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, the only work by the master on display. Presented in a reflective black room inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms, the artwork transforms into a sensory experience.
Title: Caravaggio – Between Darkness and Light
When: until December 14, 2025
Where: Teatro Popolare Samonà, Sciacca
