Exhibitions to see in Italy in December 2025 From Walter Rosenblum's social photography in Milan to Evita Andújar's paintings in Palermo
December is a strange month. It closes and opens, pauses and accelerates. It fills up with lights, ornaments, decorations. Streets and shops are invaded by crowds frantically hunting for the perfect gift, dazzled by discounts and glittering packaging. While the world dresses itself up and the air fills with overplayed playlists, homes sprout trees, gingerbread cookies, and old Christmas movies. But December is also a month of reckoning. And what better place to reflect on the year that is ending than a museum or an art gallery? Amid this chaos, exhibitions become useful spaces for understanding where we are headed. Here, no fake enthusiasm is needed. There is no noise. You just have to look. There is Palermo, which, thanks to Evita Andújar, vibrates with an ancestral femininity; Rome, which unrolls the gold of the pharaohs as if it were a new visual language; Brescia, which with Marilisa Cosello stretches like a political muscle; Naples, revealing its urban undergrounds; and Milan, where Walter Rosenblum’s shots remind us that tenderness is sometimes more revolutionary than anger.
The 10 exhibitions to see in Italy in December 2025
Luigi Ghirri - Prato
If you’re looking for an exhibition that reconnects you with your visual memory, the corner where landscapes, objects, and fragments of life settle, then Luigi Ghirri. Polaroid ’79–’83 is the right one to visit. This is not “the Ghirri we think we know.” He is more intimate, more vulnerable, almost domestic. The Polaroids become an instant-development diary, a gesture of trust toward the unexpected. There is Italy, the Italy of small things that become enormous through his gaze, and there is also Amsterdam, where he experiments with the monumental 20×24 Polaroid, trying to rebuild his emotional ecosystem elsewhere. The exhibition unfolds like an emotional map intertwining conceptualism, nostalgia, and unexpected lightness. It invites viewers to reflect on how we generate images and how we consume them every day. A must-see for anyone who loves the aesthetics that invented much of the way we look today, feeds, stories, and suspended expectations.
Title: Luigi Ghirri. Polaroid ’79- ’83
When: until May 10, 2026
Where: Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
Boundaries from Gauguin to Hopper – Codroipo
The exhibition hosted at Villa Manin until April 12, 2026 is an international journey into the most fascinating and elusive concept of all: the boundary. The exhibition is a choreography of 136 masterpieces from 43 European and American museums. All the works speak of distances, thresholds, suspended identities, and bear the signature of about fifty of the greatest artists of the 19th and 20th centuries: from Rothko to Kiefer, from Courbet to Monet (an entire room is dedicated to the water lilies), from Munch to Van Gogh, from Gauguin to Andrew Wyeth, from Hopper to Diebenkorn. These are paintings that seem to breathe, that look back at you while you wonder what “beyond” truly is. Each section is a small world. There is the boundary as horizon, the boundary as introspection, the boundary between man and nature, the boundary that becomes dissolution. Magnificent also are the Japanese woodcuts, showing how ukiyo-e crossed borders and shaped the European imagination. And the finale: a cosmic vertigo of mountains, skies, sunsets, and universes. A filling, disorienting exhibition that demands to be breathed slowly. Perfect for those staying home for the holidays but wanting to travel with their minds.
Title: Confini da Gauguin a Hopper. Canto con variazioni
When: until April 12, 2026
Where: Villa Manin, Esedra di Levante, Passariano di Codroipo
Alice Neel - Turin
If there is a painter who speaks to us today like few others, it is Alice Neel. The Pinacoteca Agnelli dedicates to her the first Italian retrospective, already enough to make it one of December’s unmissable exhibitions in Italy. Neel, with her raw, tender, political portraiture, is the older sister we never had. She portrays everyone: friends, children, intellectuals, queer activists, workers, strangers. There is no hierarchy, no pose. Only truth, sometimes abrasive, sometimes affectionate. And the 20th century bursts into every face. The exhibition follows Neel through seven decades, alternating life and work, between psyche, politics, desire, loss, and community. At the end of I Am the Century, visitors come face to face with their own truest selves, asking: “Who are we when someone really sees us?” For lovers of portraiture as a collective mirror, this is a must.
Title: Alice Neel. I Am the Century
When: until April 6, 2026
Where: Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin
Graphic Japan – Bologna
December is also the perfect month to fall in love with new aesthetics or return to the roots of our favorite visual imagination. Graphic Japan. From Hokusai to Manga is one of those exhibitions that doesn’t merely tell a story, it stratifies, envelops, builds a visual continuity spanning three centuries of Japanese graphic art, landing straight into the present, crystal clear. With over 200 works, it moves from ukiyo-e prints to the seriality of contemporary manga, showing how certain lines, color palettes, and graphic gestures have become a global language. Nature, portraits, calligraphy, typography, fashion, cinema, comics, design… everything is mixed into a flow that never stops, as if Japanese art had the unique ability to make opposites converse: simplicity and complexity, lightness and power, stillness and movement. Ideal for fans of pop culture, for those raised on anime, minimalist posters, and aesthetics that say a lot while keeping very little on the surface. A rare exhibition able to unite generations.
Title: Graphic Japan. Da Hokusai al Manga
When: until April 6, 2026
Where: Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna
Deng Shiqing & MJ Torrecampo - Genoa
Genoa hosts a double solo exhibition seemingly conceived for those who experience art as an extension of the body and as an archive of stories to reactivate. Truths We Inherit resonates with two powerful young voices who boldly explore complex territories: maternity, identity, diaspora, memory, technologies, myth. Deng Shiqing works with the female body as both battleground and site of care. She tackles surrogacy, reproductive rights, and biopolitics with razor-sharp irony, through fruits, eggs, soft shapes that seem reassuring yet convey urgency. Her images feel tactile, speaking to muscles as much as to eyes. MJ Torrecampo instead brings Filipino mythology into the contemporary, exploding it across perspectives from above, unusual materials, and suspended figures inhabiting an elsewhere built from diasporic memory and emotional genealogies. Together, the two artists build a dialogue that is a bridge between worlds.
Title: Deng Shiqing & MJ Torrecampo: Truths We Inherit: Le verità che ereditiamo
When: until March 3, 2026
Where: C+N Gallery CANEPANERI, Genoa
Evita Andújar - Palermo
In Palermo, Evita Andújar’s painting arrives like a warm, dense wave, a vibration that passes through you without warning. De Rerum Natura centers the female body not as a theme but as a cosmic territory, where the mystical and the earthly coexist with no dividing lines. Her figures are soft, luminous, full of a breath that feels almost audible. They enter the space with quiet confidence, a presence that seeks no legitimization. It simply exists. Nature is present, yes, but not as a backdrop: as an emotional extension. And there is also an energy of affirmation resonating with November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Without posters, without slogans, without proclamations, each face carries its own declaration: female presence is political simply by existing. Andújar’s painting mixes technical lyricism, an almost Impressionist light, and an intimacy reminiscent of Frida Kahlo. Her subjects look at us as if they know more than we do. Each portrait becomes a point of emergence, where the inner world surfaces, and the viewer ends up breathing at the same rhythm as the canvas.
Title: De Rerum Natura
When: until January 24, 2026
Where: Galleria d’arte Il Casino delle Muse, Palermo
Pharaohs - Rome
The exhibition Treasures of the Pharaohs seems made for those who love getting lost in details and finding themselves in objects. Over one hundred pieces arrive like glimmers from a three-thousand-year-old elsewhere: sarcophagi like small spacecrafts, amulets whispering formulas, jewels conceived as power statements long before they were aesthetic ones. The path is fluid, choreographed. Visitors move among queens, generals, artisans, realizing that Egypt was a whole imaginative universe, not just a civilization. The final statues (kneeling Hatshepsut in offering gesture, the dyad of Thutmose III with Amun, the Triad of Menkaure, and the gold mask of Amenemope) feel like the closing of a film set where divinity needs no special effects. Then the Mensa Isiaca reminds us that Rome and Egypt have always been closer than we think, like two worlds that flirted for centuries. This exhibition may look like archaeological nostalgia but is, in fact, a mirror of our contemporary obsession with power, prestige, symbol. Only, they did it better.
Title: Tesori dei Faraoni
When: until May 3, 2026
Where: Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome
Marilisa Cosello - Brescia
Marilisa Cosello brings to Brescia a body-to-body confrontation with the political and performative imagination of the 20th century, breaking it apart and reassembling it as pop, though never lightweight. Complex is an exhibition that makes you want to move. There are postures, exercises, discipline, but also friction, resistance, femininity that refuses to be soft. Her images (videos, sculptures, photographs, drawings) have the sharp hardness of uniforms and the stubborn fragility of athletes who never stop. From early works to exercises, to the Try series (sport turned into identity symbol), to American Dream (a consumed, muscular, slightly toxic dream), her research asks where gesture ends and ideology begins, and, above all, how one inhabits the body when everything is narrative. Cosello takes the rhetoric of the last century and empties it out, cleaning it to the bone, leaving only what pulses. An exhibition that isn’t just seen, it trains you, provokes you, passes through you.
Title: Marilisa Cosello. Complex
When: until February 7, 2026
Where: Spazio contemporanea, Brescia
Dimitris Kontodimos & Gabriel Orlowski - Naples
In Naples, Transit Grounds catapults visitors into a city that doesn’t exist on Google Maps, a metabolic, frenetic, tired and lucid city that consumes and is consumed. Kontodimos and Orlowski work like two extremes of the same urban body: the former collects scraps and elevates them to future ruins; the latter photographs the present as if it were already archaeology. Kontodimos’s sculptures look like relics from an era that never happened, and yet instantly recognizable. They scream “urban fatigue.” Orlowski’s photographs, on the other hand, are expanses of never-resting infrastructures, characters who seem extras from the rawest capitalism. Always moving, always depleting. Together they build a friction almost musical: flow versus sediment, the rushing present versus the already-old future. This double exhibition reveals Naples as a continuous emergence of exhausted memories and prematurely aged futures. It doesn’t represent the city, it exposes it, like an open wound.
Title: Dimitris Kontodimos / Gabriel Orlowski – Transit Grounds
When: until January 17, 2026
Where: Shazar Gallery, Naples
Walter Rosenblum - Milan
Walter Rosenblum arrives in Milan with over one hundred photographs that are soft punches to the stomach. His is a story of gazes that bear witness more than images that narrate. From immigrant New York to D-Day, from Spanish refugees to the South Bronx, Rosenblum doesn’t photograph to denounce, he photographs to belong. Each shot is a love declaration to humanity, even when humanity is at war, in flight, in struggle. The exhibition’s title is perfect: The World and Tenderness. Because here the world is rough, complex, real; tenderness is what remains, a second skin. Many images had never been shown in Italy and have the power of things that do not shout. They portray children playing, soldiers waiting, faces looking into the lens the way one looks at someone you can trust. Social photography, yes, but with a caress inside. An exhibition reminding us that history is not just facts, but people.
Title: Il mondo e la tenerezza. Walter Rosenblum
When: from December 3, 2025 to February 19, 2026
Where: Centro Culturale di Milano, Milan
