The Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation Institution presents the exhibition by the Italian artist Giangiacomo Rossetti, opening on Monday, May 4, 2026. Curated by Milovan Farrono, the extensive exhibition consists of a series of new paintings among the largest ever made by the artist flanked by pre-existing works. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of Mendes Wood DM.
In conjunction with 61. International Art Exhibition - The Venice Biennale 2026, the exhibition marks a significant threshold in Rossetti's practice: a turning point that the artist himself recognizes. In his intentions, an idea returns with insistence: how painting can expand, really expand, both in scale and in vision. It is the first occasion in which Rossetti chooses to confront himself with large canvases, larger than any previous work, and at the same time the first moment in which his figurative language so deeply rooted in the circle of friends in Milan, in his extended family in New York and in that universe of daily presences that has animated his portraits for years opens up to what the artist defines a "cosmic breath".
The expression should not be understood in a descriptive or astronomical sense, but as access to a wider and rarefied field, in which the worlds that inhabit his painting begin to collide and slip into each other. The physical, the abstract, the real and the imagined combine, as if the pictorial surface were crossed by currents capable of moving its center of gravity.
The blue color recurs in Rossetti's previous works and now re-emerges in a new series of monochrome monotypes. Every work vibrates with a spiritual, celestial, marine and atmospheric tonality at the same time. Color becomes the thread of continuity that allows Rossetti's worlds to meet and, sometimes, to collide, as it happens in the relationships between his subjects. However, in the re-emerging of blue, Rossetti also recognizes a previous starting point: a painting from a few years ago, Untitled, After Balla's Spiritual scene man and woman in the fluid interpenetrated with light (2018). Conceived as a tribute to Giacomo Balla, the work depicts a face immersed in a vortex of color, a figure permeated by futuristic light. This work represents the remote core of his new approach, the trail of a cosmic impulse that the artist today tries to focus more and amplify. The painting from 2018 so far an isolated episode is taken up for this exhibition, taking inspiration from the masterpiece of Piero della Francesca, Costantino's dream. Presented on a monumental scale compared to the original, the new work is able to reveal the genealogy of the artist's path.
As the curator Milovan Farronato observes: "This new development in Rossetti's work is a passage towards a form of painting that preserves its figurative truth and attention to faces and affections, while embracing a wider dimension, a vibration that envelops the figures and suspends them in a state of flow. It is as if every portrait belonged to a parallel universe in which the daily life of friends, companions and the intimate community that has always inhabited his paintings could coexist with a more abstract, more open, perhaps more imaginative breath. They are worlds that collide, but it is precisely in this collision that the exhibition space takes shape: a place where the past, present, memory and premonition meet and reconcile within the same shade of blue, like waves that meet and transform without ever losing their primordial scheme».
The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
