Cassandra Crying, 2016
Francesco Vezzoli: Divas
March 30, 2025 - June 2, 2025
“The exhibition [“Divas”] unfolds along two interwoven trajectories: a historical narrative and a deeply personal reflection—both aesthetic and emotional—on cinema and its enduring legacies.”
Francesco Vezzoli
“Divas” pays homage to the enduring legacy of European and American cinema and the cultural weight of 20th-century stardom and historical cinematic movements. Through his embroideries of “divas,” Vezzoli disrupts the fantasy of iconic movie stars and opera primadonnas by exposing the delicate reality beneath the surface.
Spanning 25 years of Vezzoli’s artistic production, each embroidery work in this show is matched with the poster of a significant film featuring the actor portrayed – such as Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, and Silvana Mangano – and bridges Vezzoli’s deeply personal cinematic history with the collective imagination shaped by film. The pairing of embroidery and poster along two long corridors with theater seats at the center invites viewers to engage with both the historical and emotional dimensions of cinema and offers a layered perspective on the relationship between stardom and artistic interpretation. By blending classic narratives with emotional introspection, the exhibition highlights cinema’s enduring influence on Vezzoli’s vision and the cultural landscape at large.
The exhibition is curated by Nancy Spector and Shai Baitel.
Special Support
Francesco Vezzoli
SHORT BIO
Francesco Vezzoli (b. Brescia, 1971) lives and works in Milan. One of the most successful Italian artists in the world today, his work can be described as a series of strong allegories about contemporary culture with a rich subtext of elaborate references involving video installations, petit-point embroideries (especially, portraits of iconic divas crying glitter tears), photography, live performances, media experiments and -most recently- classical sculpture.
He has shown his works at the Venice Biennale on a number of occasions: first in 2001, then in 2005, with a video entitled Trailer for a remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, a reinterpretation of Tinto Brass’s film Caligula, featuring Benicio Del Toro, Milla Jovovich and Adriana Asti, among others, and again in 2007, with an art video in which Sharon Stone and Bernard-Henri Lévy compete for the presidency of the United States. He also took part in the 26th Bienal de São Paulo in 2004, in the Whitney Biennial in 2006 and Performa (2007 and 2015) in New York.
Vezzoli has exhibited in the most important Italian and international museums and institutions: the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2002), Castello di Rivoli (2002), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2004 and 2005), Tate Modern in London (2006), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007), the Kunsthalle in Vienna (2009), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2009), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2009-10) and NMNM- Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2016).
In 2013 he took centre stage in three solo shows at MAXXI in Rome, at MoMA PS1 in New York and at MOCA in Los Angeles with his The Trinity project. At Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2017 he presented TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai, retracing the wealth of television productions in the 1970s.
Furthermore, he produced a live opera performance for the 40th anniversary of Centre Pompidou and in 2019 he brought the exhibition Huysmans Critique d’Art: De Degas à Grünewald, sous le Regard de Francesco Vezzoli at Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
In 2021, Vezzoli worked with Fondazione Brescia Musei on the exhibition project Palcoscenici Archeologici, Interventi curatoriali di Francesco Vezzoli, and again that year he was the protagonist of the Francesco Vezzoli in Florence exhibition, with two new sculptures in Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. This made him the first living Italian artist to create a site-specific work for Piazza della Signoria, creating an interaction between contemporary art and the city’s historical heritage.
His latest exhibitions, “VITA DVLCIS: fear and desire in the Roman Empire” at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and “Museums of Tears” at Museo Correr in Venice, allowed him to relate his recent artworks, respectively, to Roman archaeological masterpieces and Italian historical paintings.