Exhibitions to see in February 2026 in Italy From masters of photography such as Edward Weston to art history with the rediscovery of the Macchiaioli
If January is the month of good intentions, February is the one when we decide what is really worth seeing. Less hype, fewer lines, more time to understand what is truly inside an exhibition project. The shows open during this period arrive without much noise, but with a clear intention to tell stories, reread icons, and question images we thought we already knew. The result is a varied and well-balanced calendar that spans historic museums and contemporary spaces, major cities like Milan and Rome, but also more decentralized contexts. Why not take a trip to Modica to discover a Palestinian artist, or to Naples to see the dialogue between Warhol and Banksy? There are many projects running across the Italian peninsula. The choice is wide, ranging from masters of photography like Edward Weston to art history with the rediscovery of the Macchiaioli, all the way to a project entirely dedicated to Franco Battiato. Which one inspires you the most?
Exhibitions to see in February 2026 in Italy
The Macchiaioli – Milan
The Milan exhibition dedicated to the Macchiaioli restores depth and complexity to a fundamental chapter of Italian art. More than one hundred works recount the brief yet extremely intense season of a group of painters who, in the midst of the Risorgimento, chose to break with the academy in order to depict reality: natural light, everyday life, landscape, war. The exhibition focuses on Fattori, Lega, Signorini, and Borrani, showing how the macchia was not just a painting technique, but a way of being in the world, of observing, simplifying, and taking a stand. Rapid, direct, anti-rhetorical painting, deeply political. An exhibition that works because it explains without weighing things down, restoring to the Macchiaioli their role as true outsiders of their time.
Title: I Macchiaioli
When: from February 3 to June 14, 2026
Where: Palazzo Reale, Milan
John Giorno - Bologna
MAMbo in Bologna dedicates John Giorno his first major Italian retrospective. Poet, performer, activist, and a key figure of the New York avant-garde, Giorno transformed the word into a physical, political, and collective experience, taking it out of books and into real life. The exhibition retraces over sixty years of work, from linguistic collages to performances, from iconic posters to collaborations with Warhol, Patti Smith, and William Burroughs, up to the legendary Dial-A-Poem, here reimagined in an Italian version. It is an exhibition that vibrates, speaking of community, sexuality, AIDS, Tibetan Buddhism, and counterculture. In an era in which words are often emptied of meaning, Giorno, who knew how to make them living matter, reminds us how radical they can still be.
Title: John Giorno: The Performative Word
When: from February 5 to May 3, 2026
Where: MAMbo, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna
Edward Weston - Turin
CAMERA Torino brings to Italy a major retrospective dedicated to Edward Weston, an absolute master of modern photography. The 171 images on display trace the transition from pictorialism to straight photography, technical rigor, the use of large format, and the obsessive search for perfect form, but above all the extraordinary talent of an artist who transformed simple subjects such as peppers, shells, bodies, and landscapes into essential, almost abstract forms. Weston did not photograph. He sculpted with light. Turin thus becomes an unmissable stop for anyone who loves photography.
Title: Edward Weston. La materia delle forme
When: from February 12 to June 2, 2026
Where: CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Turin
Malak Mattar - Modica
Long Live Gaza by Malak Mattar brings to Modica a direct reflection on the trauma of war that is at once a punch in the gut and an act of love. Born in Gaza in 1999, the artist uses a simple, almost childlike visual language to recount an experience that is anything but simple. “How do you paint a genocide?” is the question running throughout the exhibition. Mattar answers by going beyond reportage or raw realism. Her works avoid explicit representations of violence and instead work through symbols, colors, and suspended figures. Missiles that resemble toys, floating bodies, bright colors coexisting with mourning. The result is an emotional narrative that speaks of loss, memory, and resilience.
Title: Long Live Gaza
When: until March 30, 2026
Where: Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica
Warhol Vs Bansky - Naples
Andy Warhol and Banksy meet in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, giving rise to a dialogue between two artists who turned the image into a global language. Two opposing ways of being global icons: on one side the art system and celebrity culture, on the other street art and anonymity. The exhibition path moves through portraits, silkscreens, stencils, and iconic works, showing how both artists managed to speak to a broad audience without giving up a critical charge. From Marilyn Monroe to the Madonna with a gun, more than 100 works reveal how art can be consumption, provocation, and collective ritual at the same time. And Naples? Here it becomes the third protagonist, a visceral, layered city, constantly balanced between the sacred and the profane, just like the images on display.
Title: Warhol Vs Bansky Passaggio a Napoli
When: until June 2, 2026
Where: Villa Pignatelli, Casa della Fotografia, Naples
Mimmo Rotella - Catanzaro
Twenty years after his death, Mimmo Rotella symbolically returns home to Catanzaro, his birthplace, with an exhibition centered on self-portraiture as a critical gesture. At the Casa della Memoria, a symbolic place for the artist, Rotella’s face becomes a surface to tear, overlap, and question. Between décollage, painting, and sculpture, ironic and ruthless self-portraits span forty years of research, revealing an artist allergic to narcissism, capable of treating his own face the same way he treated urban posters, that is, as a surface to be attacked. An intimate, rough, and necessary exhibition to understand how relevant Rotella still is today.
Title: Autorotella
When: until March 29, 2026
Where: Casa della Memoria, Catanzaro
Helen Chadwick - Florence
The first Italian retrospective dedicated to Helen Chadwick, hosted at the Museo del Novecento in Florence, finally places the spotlight on a radical, sensual, political, and fundamental artist who anticipated many themes that are central today, from eco-feminism to queer culture. Body, nature, identity, fluids, desire, everything in her work is total experience. It is crossing, contamination, a challenge to the boundaries between body and matter, pleasure and politics. From performances to the iconic Piss Flowers, the exhibition highlights the enduring power of Chadwick’s work, proving that art can be disturbing without being gratuitous, sensual without being decorative.
Title: Helen Chadwick. Life Pleasures
When: until March 1, 2026
Where: Museo del Novecento, Florence
Antonio Scaccabarozzi - Venice
Until April 6, 2026, Museo Fortuny hosts Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés, a site-specific project that transforms painting into a perceptual experience. At its core is the concept of transparency, understood not (or not only) as a visual effect, but as a method of knowledge: seeing through, crossing over, questioning the boundary between artwork, space, and gaze. Scaccabarozzi’s works, created between the 1980s and early 2000s, are made of light, translucent materials such as acetates and polyethylene, conceived as real membranes in space. Historical cycles like Quantità libere, Polietileni, and Banchise naturally dialogue with the legacy of Mariano Fortuny, sharing an attention to light, layering, and the relationship between art, architecture, and the viewer’s body. The result is a physical and sensory journey, suspended between historical memory and contemporaneity.
Title: Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés
When: until April 6, 2026
Where: Museo Fortuny, Venice
Giovanni Gastel - Milan
Giovanni Gastel. Rewind is much more than a photographic retrospective. It is a journey into the gaze of an artist who moved through fashion, portraiture, and still life without ever losing a recognizable personal signature, marked by irony, visual culture, and an almost literary attention to detail. More than 250 images build a non-chronological path, organized by themes and affinities rather than career milestones. Fashion dialogues with portraiture, editorial work meets experimentation, formal rigor coexists with a constant sense of lightness. Milan is not just the location of the exhibition, but a constant presence, almost a character in itself, the city that shaped Gastel’s eye and reflects his composed, cultured, ironic, never loud aesthetic. Palazzo Citterio becomes the ideal setting to convey this complexity, turning Rewind into a visual narrative that speaks of style, but above all of sensitivity and intelligence of vision.
Title: Giovanni Gastel. Rewind
When: until July 26, 2026
Where: Palazzo Citterio, Milan
Franco Battiato - Rome
MAXXI celebrates Franco Battiato as a total artist with an immersive project that moves through music, images, and thought. The seven sections of the exhibition, from electronic experimentation to pop, from spiritual research to cinema, highlight his many facets: musician, philosopher, painter, filmmaker. Difficult to define in a single way. At the heart of the exhibition, an immersive sound installation transforms listening into a physical experience. Battiato emerges as a unique figure, capable of holding together avant-garde and pop, East and West, irony and transcendence. The portrait of an artist who spoke to different generations without ever simplifying his language.
Title: Franco Battiato. Un’altra vita
When: until April 26, 2026
Where: MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome
