Keeping Up with Milan’s Art SEPTEMBER 2025
Welcome back, dear readers, to the September issue of Keeping Up with Milan’s Art, where we trace the city’s ever-changing gallery map and spotlight the shows you don’t want to miss!
In this edition, we will explore the spaces where boundaries blur: East and West, artist’s life and artwork, high art and everyday objects. Across the city, a common thread emerges. It reminds us that contemporary art thrives in the in-between: in the dialogues that unsettle categories, cross geographies, and expose the porous edges of our experience. And trust me, this is worth unravelling!
Yuko Mohri, Entanglements, 2025. Installation views, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Via Chiese 2, Milan. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
Our journey begins at Building Terzo Piano, where Delphine Valli stages The Impossible Present. Caleidoscopio, a kaleidoscopic meditation of the very notion of “impossible present”. The exhibition is a shifting constellation of photographs, installations, objects, and text; some of which expand directly from her recent book of the same title. This publication, part diary, part visual atlas, now unfolds in space, its pages translated into beams, fragments, and layered images. Walking through the gallery, I felt as though I had stepped into a prism, one that refracts memory and vision into multiple, unstable images.
At the heart of Valli’s practice lies a tension between what appears on the surface and what quietly resists beneath it. What seems simple at first glance gradually reveals a layered complexity, as forms overlap and hidden geometries press against the visible. It is a meditation on the act of perception itself: how much do we really see, and how much do we overlook? In her work, the surface becomes a threshold. Fragile, shifting, and unstable, it invites us to linger, to question, and to acknowledge that every present moment is charged with echoes of what lies beyond.
From the fragile immateriality of Valli, we move to Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, where Japanese artist Yuko Mohri implements Entanglements. Mohri takes invisible forces, magnetism, air currents, dust, even humidity, and transforms them into delicate kinetic installations. Everyday objects (a watering can, wires, broken speakers) are wired together into ecosystems that twitch, hum, and react to their surroundings.
Standing inside the exhibition, I felt as if I was eavesdropping on the secret life of matter. The works are alive, not in a biological sense, but in how they respond to shifts in space and environment. A subtle vibration, a small magnetic pull, a chain reaction between objects. All remind us that we are part of a continuum, and that the boundary between art and the physical world is far thinner than we imagine.
I was struck by the humility of Mohri’s practice. Nothing here screams for attention. Instead, the works whisper, revealing how the most unremarkable things, such as dust, electricity and air, carry infinite potential for wonder.
Yuko Mohri, Entanglements, 2025. Installation views, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Via Chiese 2, Milan. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
Next stop: Palazzo Reale, where the legendary surrealist Leonora Carrington is honored with a sweeping Retrospective. If Valli and Mohri deal with the fragility of the present and the presence of invisible forces, Carrington pulls us into entirely different realms: dreamscapes populated with alchemical figures, mystical hybrids, and timeless symbols.
Moving from canvas to canvas, I found myself immersed in Carrington’s vast cosmology: part feminist critique, part esoteric mythology, part ecological warning. Her paintings resist easy interpretation; they are not puzzles to be solved but portals to be entered. At one point I caught myself just standing in front of a work, trying to decipher its impossible logic, until I realized the point wasn’t to understand but to experience.
What resonated most was how contemporary her work feels. In an age of ecological uncertainty and spiritual searching, Carrington’s visions, once relegated to the surrealist margins, speak urgently to our present. In these stories, time disappears and I found myself lost in the floating reality sketched by the artist.
Leonora Carrington, Sous la rose des vents (1955; oil on canvas, 54.6 x 33.7 cm; Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., 2022.22.McD)
Let us finally turn to Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia, entitled An Unexpected Collection. The New Art of the Sixties and a Tribute to Robert Rauschenberg. Compared to the dreamscapes of Carrington or the fragile ecosystems of Mohri, this show feels grounded in the radical experimentation of the postwar years.
Rauschenberg, of course, takes center stage. His “Combines” (audacious fusions of painting, sculpture, and found objects) still feel startlingly fresh. Seeing them alongside other 1960s works highlights how profoundly this era redefined art: collapsing the border between high culture and everyday life, mixing media, and placing the “ordinary” in the spotlight.
An Unexpected Collection. The New Art of the Sixties and a Tribute to Robert Rauschenberg at Gallerie d’Italia. Ph. Maurizio Tosto
For me, the thrill was recognizing the lineage. Without Rauschenberg’s playful audacity, could we fully grasp Mohri’s assemblages? Without the radical 1960s embrace of hybridity, would Valli’s kaleidoscopic approach resonate so strongly? The exhibition is less a nostalgic look back than a reminder that today’s boundary-blurring has deep historical roots.
Taken together, these four displays form a dialogue across generations, geographies, and sensibilities. Valli reminds us of the fragility of the present. Mohri makes the invisible palpable. Carrington opens portals into myth and psyche. Rauschenberg and his contemporaries show us that boundaries, whether between painting and sculpture, high and low, art and life, are meant to be crossed.
