The Dead

Opens Monday, May 4 The Institution Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa presents an exhibition by the Italian artist Giangiacomo Rossetti. Curated by Milovan Farronato, the extensive exhibition consists of a series of new paintings among the largest ever created by the artist, alongside pre-existing works. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of Mendes Wood DM. In conjunction with the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2026, the exhibition marks a significant threshold in Rossetti’s practice: a turning point that the artist himself recognizes. In his intentions, one idea returns insistently: how painting can expand, truly expand, both in scale and in vision. It is the first occasion in which Rossetti chooses to engage with large-format 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 everyday presences that has animated his portraits for years—opens to what the artist defines as a “cosmic breath.” The expression should not be understood in a descriptive or astronomical sense, but as access to a broader and more rarefied field, in which the worlds that inhabit his painting begin to collide and to slip into one another. The physical, the abstract, the real, and the imagined combine, as if the pictorial surface were traversed by currents capable of shifting its center of gravity. The color blue recurs in Rossetti’s earlier works and now re-emerges in a new series of monochrome monotypes. Each work vibrates with a tone that is at once spiritual, celestial, marine, and atmospheric. The color becomes the thread of continuity that allows Rossetti’s worlds to meet and, at times, to clash, as happens in the relationships between his subjects. However, in the reappearance of blue, Rossetti also recognizes an earlier point of departure: a painting from some years ago, Untitled, After Balla’s Scena spirituale uomo e donna nel fluido compenetrato di luce (2018). Conceived as a tribute to Giacomo Balla, the work depicts a face immersed in a vortex of color, a figure permeated by futurist light. This work represents the distant core of his new approach, the trace of a cosmic impulse that the artist today seeks to bring more sharply into focus and to amplify. The 2018 painting, until now an isolated episode, is taken up again for this exhibition, drawing inspiration from Piero della Francesca’s The Dream of Constantine. Presented on a monumental scale in relation to the original, the new work is able to reveal the genealogy of the artist’s trajectory. As the curator Milovan Farronato observes: “This new development in Rossetti’s work is a passage toward a form of painting that preserves its figurative truth and its attention to faces and to relationships, while at the same time embracing a broader dimension—a vibration that envelops the figures and suspends them in a state of flow. It is as if each portrait belonged to a parallel universe in which everyday life—friends, companions, and the intimate community that has always inhabited his paintings—could coexist with a more abstract, more open, perhaps more imaginative breath. These are worlds that collide, but it is precisely in this collision that the space of the exhibition takes shape: a place in which past, present, memory, and premonition meet and are reconciled within the same shade of blue, like waves that meet and transform without ever losing their primordial pattern.” The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York. Giangiacomo Rossetti (b. 1989, Milan, Italy) lives and works in New York. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and in 2019 graduated from the Institut Kunst FHNW in Basel. His solo exhibitions include: Mendes Wood DM, Germantown (2025); Greene Naftali, New York (2024); Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2024 and 2021); The Power Station, Dallas (2023); Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2022); Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2021); Greene Naftali, New York (2020); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2019); Riverside, Bern (2018); Federico Vavassori, Milan (2017); Warm, São Paulo (2016). His work has also been presented in group exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM at d’Ouwe Kerke, Retranchement (2024, 2023 and 2020); Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli (2022); David Zwirner, New York (2022); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2022); Fondazione CRC, Cuneo (2021); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2020); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Ghent (2020); Modern Art, London (2020); Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (2019); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2018); Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2018).