There are avant-garde languages ​​in early 20th-century Italy that find their highest expression in the Futurist generation. And there is the contemporary in dialogue with the Renaissance architecture of Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, among the surprising visions of Maurizio Cattelan, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst.
2023 upon us has many surprises in store for art lovers, including painting, performance, photography.
Here are eight exhibitions not to be missed in the upcoming year.

Lotto, Romanino, Moretto, Ceruti. The champions of painting challenge each other in Brescia
Starting from 21 January Brescia will host one of the most awaited exhibitions of 2023, part of the “Bergamo Brescia Italian Capital of Culture 2023” program. The exhibition itinerary entitled Lotto, Romanino, Moretto, Ceruti. The champions of painting in Brescia and Bergamocurated by Davide Dotti, organized by the Friends of Palazzo Martinengo Association, with the sponsorship of the Province of Brescia, the Municipality of Brescia, the Municipality of Bergamo, the Province of Brescia Events Foundation, will bring a selection of over eighty masterpieces from Italian and foreign public and private collections, which will give life to a real cultural and artistic derby.
For the first time, the exhibition will bring into dialogue the culture and artistic production expressed by Bergamo and Brescia during the almost four centuries of Venetian domination.
The creations of the great Brescian Renaissance masters, from Foppa to Moretto, from Romanino and Savoldo to Gambara, will compete with those of their Bergamo colleagues Moroni, Palma il Vecchio, Cariani, Previtali and Lotto.
The itinerary will highlight how the common Lombard cultural substratum, revived by the innovations proposed by Venetian painters such as Bellini and Titian, has given rise to expressive languages ​​in some cases similar, in others antithetical.

In Parma, winter is pop with Roy Lichtenstein
Parma remembers Roy Lichtenstein one hundred years after his birth with an exhibition, expected at Palazzo Tarasconi from 11 February to 18 June. The itinerary, curated by Gianni Mercurio, will rattle off various themes addressed by the great American artist through a selection of over 50 works coming from prestigious European and American collections. The public will be invited to retrace Lichtenstein’s entire artistic career starting from the 1960s, to discover themes and genres, from comics to advertising, from forays into abstraction to the series of female nudes.

Roy Lichtenstein, Two Nudes, 1994

Renoir and Italy: a meeting in Rovigo
It was 1881 when the then forty-year-old Pierre Auguste Renoir began his personal Grand Tour to study the Renaissance masters. That trip to Italy was an authentic revolution for the master’s painting, shaken by a profound creative restlessness. From Venice, where the artist was struck by Carpaccio and Tiepolo, to Padua, from Florence to Rome, where he was overwhelmed by Raphael’s “simplicity and grandeur”, up to Naples, Renoir was literally struck by the beautiful country.
Look at this extraordinary report, retracing the consequences of that pilgrimage, the exhibition Renoir and Italycurated by Paolo Bolpagni and promoted by the Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo Foundation, with the Municipality of Rovigo and the Accademia dei Concordi, expected at Palazzo Roverella from 25 February to 25 June.
Following the biographical account of his son Jean, a famous director, the exhibition focuses on a specific phase of Renoir’s production: from his trip to Italy to his old age works.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Portrait d’Adèle Besson, 1918, Oil on canvas, 37 x 41 cm, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie

Perugia celebrates “The best master of Italy”
Among the key events of 2023, Perugino’s year, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia is showing off an exhibition dedicated to Pietro Vannucci, the most important painter active in the last two decades of the fifteenth century. From 4 March to 11 June, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the artist’s death, the Gallery will host the exhibition The best master of Italy. Perugino in his timecurated by Marco Pierini, director of the National Gallery of Umbria, and Veruska Picchiarelli.
The itinerary, the flagship event of the centenary celebrations, will give back to Perugino, the absolute protagonist of the Renaissance, the role of artistic pre-eminence that his public and his era had assigned him, through capital tests of his production, all prior to 1504, in moment when he was at the peak of his extraordinary career.
The exhibition project, characterized by over seventy works, will present Vannucci’s paintings prior to 1504, the year in which the painter was working on three commissions which marked the highest point of his career: the Crucifixion of the Chigi Chapel in Sant’Agostino in Siena, the Struggle between Love and Chastity formerly in Mantua, now in the Louvre in Paris, and lo Marriage of the Virgin for the chapel of the Holy Ring of the Cathedral of Perugia, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Caen (France).

The stars of contemporary art shine at Palazzo Strozzi
From 4 March 2023 the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation presents Reaching for the Stars. From Maurizio Cattelan to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The itinerary, curated by Arturo Galansino, general director of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, will present a selection of works by the most important international contemporary artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, Lara Favaretto, Cindy Sherman, William Kentridge, Berlinde De Bruyckere for celebrate in Florence the thirtieth anniversary of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, one of the most prestigious Italian collections of contemporary art. Promoted and organized by the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation and the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, the exhibition will investigate the major artistic research of the last four decades through some works that will be distributed throughout the spaces of Palazzo Strozzi, with a new installation for the Renaissance courtyard.
In addition to enhancing painting, sculpture, installation, photography and video, the project will enhance the dialogue between Palazzo Strozzi and contemporary art, while at the same time casting a glance at the younger generations.

Pietro Perugino (1448 – 1523), Marriage of the Virgin, 1502, Oil on panel, 234 x 185 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

In Lecco, spring belongs to the Futurists
The dynamisms of Giacomo Balla intertwine with the air raids of Crali, brush against the Intonarumori of Russolo, cross the bottle of Campari by Fortunato Depero. It will take place from 18 March to 18 June 2023 at the Palazzo delle Paure in Lecco, where the exhibition Futurists. A pioneering generation will explore the presence of avant-garde languages ​​in Italy in the first decades of the twentieth century. Curated by Simona Bartolena, produced and created by ViDi – Visit Different, in collaboration with the Municipality of Lecco and the Lecco Urban Museum System, the itinerary will delve into the many expressions of the Futurist experience through the works of its most famous representatives such as Giacomo Balla , Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Enrico Prampolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Antonio Sant’Elia, Fortunato Depero, Tullio Crali.
Born and developed in Italy, this movement, one of the most important in Europe, has radiated its breath of novelty and revolution in the visual arts, in literature, as well as in everyday life. The expected exhibition in Lecco will tell about Futurism in its various generations and declinations comparing it with other avant-garde artistic trends and expressions of the first three decades of the century and examining its relationship with the European scene and with the Italian society of the time.

At the Castello di Rivoli an exhibition for Michelangelo Pistoletto’s 90th birthday
In autumn 2023, to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Michelangelo Pistoletto and in conjunction with the Turin Art Week, the Castello di Rivoli will present a major solo exhibition of the artist who has contributed with his research to redefine the concept of art starting from since the mid-sixties of the last century. For this project at the Castello di Rivoli – which boasts the most important nucleus of historical works of Arte Povera in the world – Pistoletto has conceived an unprecedented immersive work-installation of great visual impact that will invade the spaces of the Manica Lunga.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of rags, 1967, Rivoli, Rivoli Castle Museum of Contemporary Art

Marcel Duchamp lands in Venice
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice houses a de luxe edition of travel cases (Louis Vuitton), an authentic portable museum with 69 miniature replicas and reproductions of Duchamp’s work, which the American patron bought from the artist in 1941. This Box in a suitcase (1935–41) will be the focus of the exhibition entitled Marcel Duchamp and the seduction of the copy, edited by Paul B. Franklin, independent scholar and Duchamp expert. In the exhibition it will be possible to appreciate important loans from prestigious Italian and American museums and from various private collections, and, in particular, from a private Venetian collection.
From 14 October to 18 March it can be admired in Venice together with the work of the artist who, throughout his oeuvre, has questioned the traditional hierarchy between original and copy. By replicating his work in various media with varying sizes and in limited editions, Duchamp radically redefined what constitutes a work of art and the identity of the artist himself.

Read also:
• Perugino shines in the National Gallery of Umbria in 2023
• Lotto, Romanino, Moretto, Ceruti. The champions of painting and Brescia and Bergamo