Facile ironia.
L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo
Easy Irony.
Irony in Italian art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni
Over 70 artists, more than 100 works and archival documents that trace the history of Italian art from the 1950s to the present through the theme of irony.
February 6 - September 7, 2025
MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art of Bologna | Sala delle Ciminiere
Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 14, Bologna
Opening: Wednesday, February 5, 2025, 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
The imaginative power of Bruno Munari, the irreverence of Piero Manzoni, the paradox of Gino De Dominicis. The political commitment of Piero Gilardi and Michelangelo Pistoletto, the challenge to female stereotypes of Tomaso Binga and Mirella Bentivoglio, and the nonsense of Adriano Spatola and Giulia Niccolai. The use of irony to reveal the contradictions of the present in Maurizio Cattelan, Paola Pivi and Francesco Vezzoli, or to expose the unwritten rules of the art system in Chiara Fumai and Italo Zuffi, and the humor of Eva & Franco Mattes, expressed through memesthetics.
From February 6 to September 7, 2025, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, part of the Settore Musei Civici Bologna, presents the major group exhibition L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo, curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni.
Designed for the spaces of the Sala delle Ciminiere, with over 100 works and archival documents by more than 70 artists, the exhibition covers a period of about seventy years, from the 1950s to the present day, with the aim of tracing the history of Italian art through the theme of irony.
Since ancient times, beginning with Socrates, irony has been associated with the «art of questioning»: a unique tool that can give us a clearer and more disenchanted vision ofreality, revealing its anomalies and contradictions. Through humorous games, parody and witty banter, irony also becomes an antidote, a funny alternative that can protect people from what ails them.
A common thread running through decades of Italian artistic production, irony emerges as a recurring aesthetic and critical strategy capable of referring to a deep meaning without openly expressing it. This device, used for centuries to unmask false certainties and propose new representations, has found particularly fertile ground in the Italian context, and artists of different generations have used its destabilizing power to question established paradigms. The weight of the Italian artistic tradition, a reactionary society strongly influenced by the Church and the Fascist past, the success of the Commedia all'italiana and the more recent, popular «cinepanettoni» films, the rise of Berlusconism and with it an aggressive consumer society: these are just some of the «institutions» to be undermined and challenged.
The title of the exhibition, ironic in itself, reminds us of the apparent simplicity of this phenomenon, while at the same time revealing its intrinsic complexity. A contradiction that becomes a play in itself, inviting the audience to question the nature of language and its commonplaces and, at the same time, the ways in which these influence our observation and how we read the world around us.
From the 1950s to the present day, with Surrealism and Metaphysical painting as important precedents, Facile Ironia traces the history of art in our country through irony as a critical and imaginative tool. The exhibition is organized around major themes that help to illustrate the different variants of irony and its transhistorical nature: irony as paradox and its relationship to play, irony as the practice of nonsense, irony as a feminist weapon in the critique of patriarchy and the Italian social order, and its role in political mobilization and as a form of institutional critique. Finally, a touch of black humor hovers over the museum spaces, running through several sections of the exhibition: an energy that seems to be the opposite of cheerfulness, leading us to face the contradictions of existence in a cynical and irreverent way.