The Exhibitions Not to Miss During Milan Art Week

Could Milan become the next European hub for the international art market? Last year, Thaddaeus Ropac planting his flag in Milan set off a flurry of buzz, as did the city becoming a prime beneficiary of Italy’s “non-dom” tax regime, introduced in 2017, which initially offered wealthy new residents a flat €100,000 annual tax rate on foreign income (later increased to €200,000). The reduced VAT tax, now at 10 percent, along with the influx of capital driven by tax incentives attracting foreign investors, has further fueled enthusiasm. Traditionally, while the Italian art market has remained healthy, it has also been contained and largely provincial. Over the past two years, however, momentum in this city in particular has begun to shift. Milan’s art ecosystem has found new ways to expand, with a wave of fresh projects, often younger and more experimental in nature, emerging despite continual financial pressures caused by gentrification.

During miart this year, the city is broadening its offering with two satellite fairs. MEGA, which launched in 2024 as an experiment, has established itself as an intimate boutique salon with just 30 exhibitors, while Paris Internationale! arrives in Milan for the first time with 34 international galleries at Palazzo Galbani. Both fairs open today (April 15), ahead of miart, which opens its 30th edition on April 17 with 160 galleries from 24 countries. In the meantime, between Milan’s major institutions, the historical Milanese galleries that anchor the scene and next-generation spaces working to refresh it, there are several art exhibitions worth seeing, whether you are in town for the fairs or for Salone, the city’s long-standing, globally influential Design Week.

The best art exhibitions in Milan

• Cao Fei, “Dash”
• Anselm Kiefer, “Le Alchimiste”
• Man Ray, “M for Dictionary”
• Rirkrit Tiravanija and Benni Bosetto
• Man Ray in a Barber Shop
• Duchamp and Sturtevant’s “Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs”
• Pietro Roccasalva, “Io ti saluto, luce, ma con nervi offesi”
• Eliška Konečná, “You were never promised a happy life”
• Gisela McDaniel, “Táifinakpo”
• “Social Unrest”
• Buhlebezwe Siwani, “uYana umhlaba”

Cao Fei, “Dash”

• Fondazione Prada
• Through September 2026

Following a major exhibition at the Museum Pudong—her first large-scale mid-career retrospective in Shanghai—Cao Fei arrives at Fondazione Prada with a new project. Titled “Dash,” the exhibition focuses on agriculture as the foundation of human civilization, presenting the artist’s long-term research across farmlands in southern and northwestern China as well as Southeast Asia. Through this work, Cao Fei examines the rise of smart agriculture while documenting the disruptive erosion of ancestral farming knowledge and systems. As she notes, “This exhibition invites viewers to step into a contemporary agricultural archaeological site, where multiple temporal dimensions intertwine. It is not a pastoral idyll of technology, but an archaeological gaze upon ‘agriculture as geological engineering.’” Set against mounting global pressures, climate-driven extreme weather, water scarcity and labor shortages caused by rural outmigration, the project reflects on how technological innovation can enhance efficiency and food security while simultaneously reshaping human-land relationships and raising urgent questions around ecology, employment and cultural continuity.

Anselm Kiefer, “Le Alchimiste”

• Palazzo Reale
• Through September 27, 2026

In the scenographic space of Sala delle Cariatidi inside Palazzo Reale, just next to the Duomo, Anselm Kiefer stages some of his monumental works, where materials and memories are alchemically transformed into poetic metaphors of the ephemerality and transience of human existence, while also suggesting the possibility of renewal and regeneration. The show brings together more than 40 large-scale paintings that Kiefer specifically conceived in dialogue with the dramatic site. At the heart of the series is the connection to Caterina Sforza, a scientist and military leader who spent her youth in Milan and authored a rare manuscript containing over 400 medicinal and alchemical recipes. Alongside her, Kiefer also pays tribute to a pantheon of brilliant women, often overlooked, including Isabella Cortese, Maria the Jewess, Marie Meurdrac, Rebecca Vaughan and Mary Anne Atwood, acknowledging their roles in shaping modern scientific thought and the enduring beauty of knowledge and wisdom.

Man Ray, “M for Dictionary”

• Gió Marconi
• Through July 24, 2026

Galleria Gió Marconi is one of Milan’s most historically grounded contemporary art galleries, bridging the city’s avant-garde legacy with a program that connects postwar conceptual practices to contemporary artistic production. During Milan’s art week, it, together with the associated foundation Fondazione Marconi, is presenting “Man Ray: M for Dictionary,” a comprehensive survey marking the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. Spanning photography, objects, painting and drawing, the exhibition unfolds as a kind of dictionary, tracing Man Ray’s lexicon and highlighting his fascination with the unstable relationships between words, images and objects, rooted in his act of self-reinvention through language. A parallel presentation, “In Other Words,” extends this inquiry through works by contemporary artists engaging similar explorations of language and meaning, including Alex da Corte, Simon Fujiwara, Wade Guyton, Allison Katz and Tai Shani, underscoring the ongoing resonance of his legacy.

Rirkrit Tiravanija and Benni Bosetto

• Hangar Bicocca
• Through July 25, 2026

Pirelli HangarBicocca—housed in a 20th-century factory complex—regularly hosts ambitious large-scale installations alongside Anselm Kiefer’s permanently housed The Seven Heavenly Palaces. This spring, the space presents “The House That Jack Built,” a major survey of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s architectural practice, where building is conceived not as a fixed form but as a social infrastructure, an open relational framework activated by visitors. Bringing together his largest body of architectural works to date, the exhibition unfolds as a sequence of scenarios that invite participation and reshape themselves through use. The concurrent solo presentation by Benny Bosetto is the Italian artist’s first major institutional exhibition. Moving fluidly between sculpture, installation and drawing, his work creates environments where biomorphic forms emerge in states of continuous transformation, shaped through intensive manual labor. Drawing on Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the exhibition treats space as a living, almost feminine body, one that holds, gathers and absorbs, articulating Bosetto’s ongoing exploration of the intimate merging of body, memory and environment.

Man Ray in a Barber Shop

• Spazio Morgagni
• Through April 30, 2026

If you’re looking for unconventional projects in unusual spaces, this is one not to miss. Walking through Città Studi on your way to meet friends at the art gathering place par excellence, the historic Bar Basso, you might not even notice it. A large black sign over the door reads “Gino Barbiere” in orange and white cursive, and inside, there is indeed a barber shop. Yet artworks are scattered throughout the space, which is Spazio Morgagni, a gallery-bodega that opened in 2024 and operates on its own, sometimes unusual terms. Behind the project is William Purita, a Milan-based art dealer. In conjunction with Gió Marconi’s Man Ray exhibition, the space is hosting “Cœur à barbe,” a presentation of multiples, lithographs, photographs, films and artist books by Man Ray, all from Galleria Gió Marconi. Curated by Giorgia Aprosio, the exhibition takes its title from one of the most tense moments between Dada and Surrealism, while also playfully echoing the identity of the space itself.

Duchamp and Sturtevant’s “Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs”

• Thaddaeus Ropac
• Through July 23, 2026

For its inaugural exhibition, which coincides with the major retrospective of Duchamp’s work currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac is staging an unprecedented intellectual and aesthetic dialogue between Marcel Duchamp and Elaine Sturtevant, who both interrogate the mechanisms of signification and value in art—Duchamp as a foundational figure and Sturtevant pushing that inquiry further through a more radical and provocative practice in the post-Duchampian context. The exhibition’s witty title, “Dialogues are mostly fried snowballs,” drawn from one of Sturtevant’s ironic remarks, resonates with Duchamp’s own disruptive use of humor to unsettle conventional relationships between symbol, language and meaning. Exploring key themes that run through Duchamp’s practice, from the kinetic to the erotic, the show reveals how his radical readymades find a critical counterpart in Sturtevant’s gesture of repetition. Rejecting the primacy of the visual, Sturtevant manually revisited and recreated works by her contemporaries in a paradoxical attempt to dematerialize them and access what she described as the “silent interior of art.” A central focus of the exhibition is her sustained engagement with iconic Duchamp readymades such as the Fountain or the Bottle Rack, presented through multiple iterations across photography, collage, drawing and sculpture. Under Sturtevant’s incisive gaze, Duchamp’s signed urinal becomes the site of an ongoing inquiry into its cult status, shifting attention from the object itself to the discourse that surrounds it, which ultimately becomes the true subject of her work.

Pietro Roccasalva, “Io ti saluto, luce, ma con nervi offesi”

• MASSIMODECARLO
• Through April 19, 2026

Pietro Roccasalva’s sustained engagement with art-historical iconography generates images suspended in time, evoking Renaissance painting while holding the enigmatic stillness of Italian Magic Realism and Metaphysical art. Staged in dialogue with the interiors of Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, Piero Portaluppi’s masterpiece of 20th-century Milanese Rationalism, this exhibition brings together new and long-established subjects from the artist’s iconographic repertoire, including imaginary landscapes and paradoxical still lifes, alongside a cast of recurring figures drawn from his personal mythology. These motifs, rooted in a dense network of references spanning literature, cinema, philosophy and art history, return and evolve across his work in a circular, almost self-generating mythological and symbolic system. At the center of this practice is a reflection on the nature of images themselves, how they are constructed, perceived and transmitted over time. Roccasalva’s paintings do not exist as isolated works but as part of an ongoing visual narrative, where meaning emerges through repetition, transformation and association, and images persist, mutate and have the potential to become cultural icons once they reach an archetypal universality.

Eliška Konečná, “You were never promised a happy life”

• East Contemporary
• Through May 30, 2026

Opening in 2020, first as a project space but quickly evolving into a gallery, East Contemporary was founded by Agnieszka Fąferek, a young Polish art professional who studied and worked in Milan and has a keen eye for talent. The gallery has carved out a distinct niche in the city through its focused mission to showcase and champion compelling, often highly experimental artists emerging from Eastern Europe, many of whom engage with post-socialist identity, memory, archives and geopolitical transitions. During the fairs, the gallery is presenting a solo exhibition by one of its most notable artists, Eliška Konečná, whose textile bas-reliefs engage with the poetics and politics of the body, moving between gesturality, physical and psychological connection and embodied memory. Working fluidly within a space of tension between figuration and abstraction, she approaches the body as a site of imprint and exposure, at once receptive and vulnerable yet actively shaping its surroundings. At the core of her practice is a sustained interest in communication and its limits, explored through the human sense of touch and the dynamic relationship between the physical and the spiritual. She has rapidly gained international recognition, particularly within institutional contexts, with recent exhibitions at Kunsthaus Hamburg, the National Gallery in Prague, where her work has also entered the collection, the City Gallery of Prague and Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław, Poland.

Gisela McDaniel, “Táifinakpo”

• Galleria Poggiali
• Through May 9, 2026

Since opening its Milan location, Florentine Galleria Poggiali has established a reputation for bringing some of the most compelling emerging artists from the U.S. to Italy, hosting Kennedy Yanko’s European debut and showing work by figures such as David Antonio Cruz, Veronica Fernandez, Esteban Ramon Pérez, Sara Zapata, Amy Bravo and Basil Kincaid. Timed with Milan Art Week, the gallery opened the Italian debut of Gisela McDaniel, which coincides with her show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Rooted in her Chamoru Indigenous heritage, McDaniel’s practice foregrounds intergenerational memory and amplifies the voices of historically marginalized people, proposing alternative ways to address contemporary crises. Titled Táifinakpo’, meaning “without end” and more deeply “without death,” the exhibition reflects a non-linear understanding of time, where ancestral presence persists and remains active. An immersive installation of 13 works, it combines painting, assemblage and embedded audio, incorporating the voices of her subjects while semi-precious stones embedded in the surfaces transform the portraits into living presences that evoke protection, resilience and spiritual grounding.

“Social Unrest”

• MATTA
• Through September 12, 2026

Launched in 2023 by young art professionals after working at major galleries, MATTA has rapidly established its reputation as a sharp new node for research-driven exhibitions within the city’s art ecosystem. Opening during art week, its new exhibition “Social Unrest” traces the genealogy of contemporary riots worldwide through their historical precedents, revealing recurring patterns that expose the structural causes of protest and collective violence. Curated by Niccolò Gravina with research by Zoé Samudzi, the exhibition brings together new commissions by Ivan Cheng, Tony Cokes, Satoshi Fujiwara, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Tiffany Sia and Sung Tieu, alongside recent works by Bernadette Corporation, Alessandro Di Pietro and Hannah Black. All the works on view were developed through an extended dialogue between the curator and the artists over more than two years of research. The exhibition design is itself experimental and boundary-pushing: designed by architecture firm Sabotage Practice, it takes the form of a fragmented, barricade-like structure built from found materials, disrupting linear narratives and obstructing any single unified view of the works.

Buhlebezwe Siwani, “uYana umhlaba”

• Consonni Radziszewski
• Through May 30, 2026

Following the cross-border merger between Lisbon-based Mandragoa and leading Polish gallery Radziszewski, Consonni Radziszewski opens its Milan space with a solo exhibition by South African artist Buhlebezwe Siwani, one of the fastest-rising figures in the Mandragoa program and a 2026 Venice Biennale artist. The show centers on a new body of work titled uYana umhlaba, literally “it is raining earth” or “tears of the earth,” unfolding as alchemical compositions where matter and energy sediment into crystalline chromatic ranges, shifting textures and sinuous abstract forms that evoke landscapes in formation, at once geological and aqueous. Rooted in the artist’s childhood memories of South Africa during apartheid, these works reflect a territory whose physical and symbolic boundaries were continually redrawn by slavery, colonialism and segregation. Among the materials, gold pigment carries the memory of the Soweto mines, while resin evokes water as a central element in her cosmology, and Sunlight green soap, widely used in rural South Africa, becomes a key conceptual device. Through it, Siwani transforms the ritual of cleansing into a critical inquiry into the politics of the body, race and gender, as well as the imposition of Christianity through baptism and the broader legacy of colonialism. Reimagined from an ephemeral cleaning agent into a dense, encrusting substance, the soap dissolves into the pictorial surface, embedding itself within the landscape as both material and metaphor for new life chapters.