Poised between conceptual rigor and subversive lightness, the exhibition Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo (Easy Irony. Irony in Italian Art Between the 20th and 21st Century) celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Bologna’s Gallery of Modern Art by using irony as an interpretive tool to explore and understand seventy years of Italian art. The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni, occupies the Ciminiere Hall at MAMbo designed by Aldo Rossi, whose structure appears transformed by a scenographic installation into an articulated semantic palimpsest. The title of the exhibition, in its paradoxical formulation, alludes to the theoretical premise that constitutes its foundation: irony is never truly “easy” and can become a sophisticated linguistic device that requires the active participation of the interlocutor to function. Similarly, ironic art has an inherently participatory nature, demanding from the viewer not simple contemplation, but an involvement capable of relating one’s own experiences with the artwork to fully elicit its meaning.
AA.VV., “Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo”, installation view, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna © Marisa Merz, by Siae 2025; © Archivio Gino De Dominicis, Foligno, by Siae 2025
The exhibition is articulated in thematic sections which, compared to chronological scanning, favor a transversal approach capable of highlighting the different declinations of irony as an aesthetic and political strategy. Paradox is the protagonist in the first stage of the journey, with Gino De Dominicis‘ famous Mozzarella in carrozza (1968-1970), a work in which the literal materialization of the name of a traditional dish generates a semantic short-circuit that becomes the starting point for a reflection on the ambiguities of language and representation. This first nucleus is followed by a section dedicated to play as a tool for deconstructing social and artistic conventions. In this context lies Bruno Munari‘s research, which with “travel sculptures” and “useless machines” (created between the ’30s and ’90s) deconstructs the functional expectations of design through the proposition of artifacts that, in their playful character, solicit a reconfiguration of the relationship between man and object. Along the same line is Pino Pascali‘s monumental Grande rettile (1966), which subverts the codes of traditional sculpture through the adoption of a deliberately light and anti-rhetorical formalization. This is followed by a section exploring irony as a feminist weapon of criticism against patriarchal society through the voices of female artists who, from the 1960s to the present, have used ironic strategies to deconstruct gender stereotypes and hierarchies. The re-installation of Carta da parato (1976), Tomaso Binga‘s historic site-specific installation presented at GAM in Bologna in 1978 during the exhibition Metafisica del quotidiano, stands as an emblematic testimony of this feminist genealogy, which continues through Ketty La Rocca‘s pseudo-advertising images, Mirella Bentivoglio‘s linguistic collages, up to the more recent research of Monica Bonvicini and Chiara Fumai.
AA.VV., “Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo”, installation view, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
The political dimension of irony finds further expression in the section dedicated to its function as a tool for collective mobilization, with particular attention to the Bolognese context that saw the emergence of phenomena such as the Metropolitan Indians, documented by Pablo Echaurren‘s works, and the practices of media détournement implemented by Radio Alice. In this context is also included the foam rubber installation (Animazione «Renzi che salta», 2015) used by Piero Gilardi during the May Day parade in 2015, testimony to an artistic research that maintains its subversive charge unaltered through the decades. No less significant is the section that analyzes irony as a critical device towards the art system, with Giuseppe Chiari‘s lapidary declarations, the deconstructive actions by Emilio Prini and Salvo, up to the more recent reflections of Italo Zuffi and Piero Golia on the power dynamics that regulate the functioning of artistic institutions. In this perspective is also placed the research of Eva & Franco Mattes, who through the appropriation of viral content ironically question the concept of originality in the era of digital reproducibility. The exhibition closes on a liminal territory where the word becomes sound matter, with a focus on irony as nonsense and on the collapse of linguistic meaning. Inside a habitable tower structure and at other points scattered throughout the room, there are phonetic experiments by artists such as Arrigo Lora Totino, Giulia Niccolai, Adriano Spatola and Patrizia Vicinelli, the latter present with the work Seven Poems (1993) exhibited for the first time outside Museion in Bolzano. The entire exhibition is permeated by that dimension of dark humor that represents the disturbing reverse of irony, a force that, while not generating immediate hilarity, induces one to confront profound existential questions. Exemplary in this sense appears Diego Perrone‘s video (Totò nudo, 2004) in which the “prince of laughter” is filmed with animation techniques inside a Dantesque “dark forest”, where he undresses revealing the human fragility hidden behind the comic’s mask, in a contemporary reworking of the archetypal figure of the “sad clown”.
AA.VV., “Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo”, installation view, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
The installation, entrusted to Filippo Bisagni, constitutes a far from accessory component of the exhibition project, configuring itself as a visual interpretation of the curatorial approach through a close dialogue with Aldo Rossi’s architecture. Bisagni has operated on what he himself defines as an “interstitial state”, evoking a design element removed from the building’s history: a staircase that should have directly connected the Ciminiere Hall with the second floor, never created due to the death of the Milanese architect. This absence has become a pretext for a radical transformation of the exhibition space through the insertion of a ramp that divides the environment into two levels, creating an ascending path punctuated by exhibition “chapels”. The red and yellow bichrome that characterizes the environments recalls Rossi’s “Modenese machine” (1931-1997), an imposing seven-meter-high structure in painted construction timber, built by him in 1983 inside the seventeenth-century dome of the Palazzina dei Giardini in Modena on the occasion of his solo exhibition, with the intent of restoring the meaning of that architecture. Following a similar reasoning, in the display designed by Bisagni, a series of citational architectural elements redesign the stylized profile of the city of Bologna, in a game of overturning between interior and exterior that extends the exhibition path beyond the physical boundaries of the room, involving the access spaces to the museum and reactivating the portico as a distinctive element of Bologna’s urban identity. Included in the exhibition path and in the catalog, we also find two works that have for some time been permanently inscribed in the functional spaces of the museum: Daniela Comani‘s Orlando’s Library (2023), appropriately located in the bookshop, and the two “exits” (Safe Exit and Dangerous Exit) drawn on a wall of the atrium by Aldo Giannotti in 2021.
AA.VV., “Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo”, installation view, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna © Francesco Vezzoli, by Siae 2025; © Antonio Don-ghi, by Siae 2025; © Giorgio De Chirico, by Siae 2025, © Antonio Donghi, by Siae 2025
The exhibition, which presents over 100 works and archival documents by more than 70 Italian artists, stands as a synthesis of what director Lorenzo Balbi defines as MAMbo’s distinctive feature: a privileged attention to Italian art, both historical and that produced by new generations. The curatorial approach has sought to balance the presence of recognized masterpieces with lesser-known works that are no less significant in the thematic economy of the exhibition, without neglecting figures who remained at the margins of the canonical narrative. In this perspective we can read the choice to include a substantial percentage of female artists (about 39, more than half of the total) and to commission new productions from emerging artists in dialogue with historical works, with the intent of thickening the meshes of the fabric of intergenerational references on which the project is based. Significant in this sense is also the decision of some established masters, such as Roberto Cuoghi, to participate with new works created specifically for the occasion. The catalog published by Società Editrice Allemandi collects, in addition to the curatorial texts, contributions from critics called to deepen the different sections of the exhibition, including Lorenzo Balbi, Filippo Bisagni, Jacopo Galimberti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Caterina Molteni, Loredana Parmesani, Cesare Pietroiusti, Francesco Poli, Valentina Tanni, Elvira Vannini, composing an interpretative apparatus that extends the reflection on irony beyond the boundaries of the physical exhibition.
AA.VV., “Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo”, installation view, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Easy Irony, as a whole, configures itself not only as a celebration of an institutional anniversary with a festive large collective exhibition but as a reaffirmation of the role of the contemporary museum as a «center of criticism, content creation, and complexity garrison», to use Lorenzo Balbi’s words in the presentation of the exhibition inaugurated as part of Art City. The exhibition, through the lens of irony as a device for destabilizing acquired certainties, thus proposes a re-reading of the history of Italian art in a non-canonical key, highlighting the persistence of aesthetic and political strategies that, from the immediate post-war period to today, have used linguistic play, paradox, and humor as forms of resistance against the rigidities of a coercive society and an often self-referential art system.
Info:
Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo (Easy Irony. Irony in Italian Art Between the 20th and 21st Century)
curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni
6/02/2025 – 7/09/2025
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | Sala delle Ciminiere
Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 14, Bologna
www.museibologna.it/mambo
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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