It started with a pair of sneakers. A black-and-white photograph of Robert Rauschenberg’s worn-out shoes, taken in 1951, bought modestly at the booth of Galerie Lelong, now hangs in the living room of Nicola Ricciardi, a curator turned strategist and the director of miart since 2020. That small act of collecting sparked something bigger: an exhibition network on Rauschenberg's centenary and a reimagining of Fiera Milano not as an alienated marketplace, but as a sustainable cultural and urban infrastructure. miart exposes the contradictions at the heart of art production — caught between neoliberal international regulations and local practices. This year, instead of forming a WhatsApp group with collectors, Ricciardi launched one with Italy’s fragmented gallery associations, working together to pressure the government into revising the 22% VAT rate that’s stifling the art sector. The fair’s halls now display a manifesto of artists speaking out against this tax. “It doesn’t just affect galleries,” she says. “It affects students, artists — the entire ecosystem.”
Fig. 1
Italy taxes art the way it taxes refrigerators – an approach that leaves the ruling class untouched while suffocating everyone else. France, by contrast, levies only 5% on art. This is a structural failure that erodes cultural labor and narrows access to art as a public good. In response, miart isn’t shouting slogans, it’s coordinating strategy. After a year of lobbying, the Minister of Culture has finally acknowledged the problem. It’s a small win, the result of quiet, collective labor – at both the front and back ends of the cultural sector. Even international gallerists including Thaddaeus Ropac have joined the effort. Thanks to Ropac’s support, Ricciardi co-produced a non-commercial Rauschenberg show at the Museo de Novecento and the vaults of Intesa Sanpaolo. “I was shocked,” Ricciardi says. “But people believe in what we’re building.”
It may sound naïve, but it’s a wager on art as a commons – not a zero-sum game.
This belief also shapes Talks Among Friends, a series public conversations unfolding across five institutions: Fondazione Prada, HangarBicocca, Museo del Novecento, Triennale, and PAC. It’s a sustainable move by Ricciardi, who managed to convene major institutions – navigating egos and bureaucracies – through the fragile structure of a local fair composed of 60% national and 40% international participants. When government support evaporates, even unlikely alliances become vital. miart offers a lesson this year in resilience and trust – not by transcending the market but by grappling its logics. Ricciardi finds ways to embed care and collectivity into an extractive system. The Rauschenberg photo isn’t just a story, it’s a reminder: even worn-out shoes can carry us forward, if we walk together.
Here are some of the highlights seen along the way:
Fig. 2
Terrone
This word, often used pejoratively in Northern Italy to describe Southerners, becomes an act of reclamation in Ugo Rondinone’s solo show at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano. With "Terrone" as its title, Rondinone returns to his roots, embracing the term with pride and tenderness. It becomes a poetic tribute to his parents and to the millions of Italians who left the South in search of work, dignity, and survival. The exhibition begins outside, where three monumental olive trees, cast in aluminum and painted white, stand sentinel. For Rondinone, they are not just emblems of resilience and rootedness, but timekeepers. Their gnarled forms condense centuries, carrying the memory of land and labor.
Inside, the exhibition’s heart is a painting: Il Quarto Stato (1901) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. The iconic image of workers advancing in solidarity is both historically and personally charged. When Rondinone visited GAM last July, he stood before it, transfixed. He turned to the curator, Caroline Bourgeois, and said, “These are my parents.” Growing up in Switzerland, two images hung in his family’s kitchen: a photo of the Pope and a postcard of Il Quarto Stato. His father would point to the latter and say, “This is us. Don’t ever forget where you come from.”
Fig. 3
In response, Rondinone conceived The Alphabet of My Parents, a large-scale installation mirroring the painting’s dimensions. It consists of casts of farming tools once used by immigrant laborers in Long Island, New York, many of them Italian. These tools, symbols of survival, echo the original sketches Pellizza made before completing the painting, where workers held tools that were ultimately removed. Rondinone, in his way, restores them.
Another subtle intervention: filters applied to the museum’s windows. Titled When the Sun Goes Down and the Moon Comes Up, this gesture doesn’t darken the gallery but opens it to crepuscular light. The filtered glow evokes a sense of transition and timelessness, creating a dialogue between the interior and the olive trees in the courtyard.
The exhibition culminates in life-size sculptures of nude dancers, cast in translucent wax mixed with soil from each of the seven continents. These figures, stilled rather than in motion, suggest quiet presence. Like Rondinone's clowns, they embrace passivity not as apathy, but as poise. The use of earth connects them to origin, place, and decay – a world made and unmade through time. Asked whether Terrone is political, Rondinone replied, “I’m not a political artist. But this is a form of poetic justice.”
Fig. 4
Unready Mades
miart’s Emergent section continues to interrogate what “emergence” means in a global art market obsessed with novelty yet resistant to structural change. As the curator Attilia Fattori Franchini explains, it’s not about age but position – emergence as a risk taken. In her seventh year curating the section, Franchini has expanded its meaning to encompass diverse practices and positions. “As long as miart wants to collaborate, I’ll keep doing it.” Among the 25-gallery “cohort,” the joint booth by gallerists Matteo Cantarella from Copenhagen and Shahin Zarinbal from Berlin – the recipient of the LCA Studio Legale Prize – presents a sharp critique of value production and display economies in the works of Sanna Helena Berger and Cecilie Norgaard.
Berger repurposes Italy’s obsolete currency, the lira, by encasing individual coins in capsules at standard painting height, the booth wall becomes a ledger of lost value (Edition of 372 + APs, EUR 160,- per unit, excl. VAT); Norgaard destabilizes the aesthetic function of painting, connecting it to labor conditions and the structures that either sustain or exploit artistic production (paintings priced up to EUR 2.900,-, excl. VAT). In their shared booth, painting is placed beneath a line of devalued money, inverting traditional hierarchies and transforming medium into message. At the booth’s center, Berger’s “unready mades” – sculptural stacks of domestic objects – function as both critique and residue: artifacts of domestic labor and capitalist accumulation. These aren’t plinths to elevate commodities, they’re monuments to use, wear, and refuse. They offer not spectacle, but a direct confrontation with the way art is made, shown, and priced.
Fig. 5
World Weaving
Water runs through Kaufmann Repetto’s booth like a buried thesis: a current of beauty, pollution, sorrow, and survival. It’s the medium in which bodies drift, labor is obscured, and global circulation shows its seams. Kresia Mukwazhi’s sculptural works, made from discarded bra straps salvaged from informal markets in Zimbabwe, speak to the flow of overproduction and post-colonial dumping. Meant to shape and constrain, these garments arrive as “donations” from the Global North, turning fashion into waste and women’s bodies into battlegrounds.
Her works weave together histories of exploitation and resistance, hanging against the rain wallpaper of Judith Hopf (size adaptable to the walls, priced at EUR 15.000,-, excl. VAT). In the paintings of Katherine Bradford, figures float – isolated, yet connected – in shared waters. Bradford’s swimmers suggest fragile solidarity; Sadie Benning’s submerged cut-outs reflect a world in crisis, drifting onward as though everything were normal. Adrian Paci extends this drift with collaged seas, a patchwork of migrations and erasures. Even the ghostly pastels of Gökçen Baltacı seem caught in transit, suspended lives glimpsed through fog and condensation.
Water gives way to a dense and layered materiality at ChertLüdde’s booth: trompe l’oeil, hair, spices, and decolonial tools to anchor a shared sensibility. Álvaro Urbano casts hand-painted apples in concrete (EUR 10.000, excl. VAT). They are remnants of a larger installation tracing queer ecologies and the disappearance of public space in New York. These are pars pro toto of what waits for you in his solo show opening during the Gallery Weekend in Berlin the first weekend of May. Ali Eyal paints from exile (EUR 15.000, excl. VAT); his dreamlike works combine helicopters, garden memories, and a child’s footprint crushing a dove. Hair, his own and his mother’s, becomes a recurring symbol of family and loss. In a recent Mexico City show, he mailed painted body fragments via FedEx to build a presence where he was denied it.
Sofía Salazar Rosales, who studied with Urbano and Petrit Halilaj, engages the colonial history of the banana trade in Ecuador in her contribution. Her sculptural works, involving bicycle tubes, metal, and muffled bells (EUR 6.000, excl. VAT), reference silenced rituals and disrupted flows of goods, bodies, and beliefs. Monia Ben Hamouda’s paintings (EUR 20.000, excl. VAT) fuse herbs, gestural abstraction, and spiritual invocation, drawing on her father’s calligraphy and using natural pigments and spices to turn paint into a ritual field.
Fig. 6
Portals
On the eve of opening their new outpost in Cologne (May 17) – a timely expansion for the increasingly contracted Rheinland scene – LC Queisser, the Herno Prize Winner for Best Exhibition Project, brought to Milan a booth that felt like both a dispatch from the margins and a sculpted microcosm of its artistic alliances. Presenting works by Tolia Astakhishvili, Thea Gvetadze, and Ser Serpas, the Tbilisi-based gallery offered a quiet intensity: fragile and violent, architectural and bodily, intimate and displaced. The painting by Ser Serpas comes from her third solo show with the gallery (EUR 20.000, excl. VAT), which unfolded in late 2024 within the climate of political upheaval in Georgia.
Paired with Astakhishvili’s installation Lites and Gates (EUR 38.000, excl. VAT), the booth revisits that moment, one shaped as much by resistance as by collaboration. Astakhishvili previously embedded a Serpas painting within the architecture of her show at the Bonner Kunstverein: subtle, visible, yet unreachable. The dialogue between their works continues here. Serpas’s recent series draws on AI-generated imagery of distorted, almost unrecognizable bodies – figures derived from algorithms, turned into raw painterly gestures. Astakhishvili, meanwhile, works with architecture as medium and metaphor. Lites and Gates – made from two lamps and a wall of canvases – evokes a portal without a passage, a recurring motif in her practice, and evoking the gallery’s former life as a Tbilisi apartment. She constructs spaces that confound orientation: mirrors, thresholds, interventions that sit uneasily in the places they inhabit.
At miart’s Portal section, Santiago Yahuarcani introduces viewers to a universe where the visible and the invisible coexist through ancestral storytelling. Born in 1961 on the banks of the Ampiyacu River in the Peruvian Amazon, Yahuarcani belongs to the Aimeni̶ clan of the Uitoto Nation. A self-taught painter and sculptor, he works with barkcloth (llanchama), natural dyes, and acrylics to materialize the myths, spirits, and cosmological visions transmitted orally by his elders. His paintings (priced EUR 30.000, excl. VAT) are not representations in the Western sense; they are activations, portals into a living knowledge system. Yahuarcani’s figures emerge from a world where plants speak, rivers listen, and the spirits of the ancestors continue to guide. These works bring forth stories that were once forbidden to be shared outside the community: the dances of creation, the spiritual flights of shamans, and the night-long vigils of ampiri and coca where knowledge is dreamed, chewed, and spoken into being.
The paintings, despite the sterile environment of the fair, speaks to a collective form of resistance rooted in the spiritual and ecological intelligence of his people, a resistance against the long durée of colonial dispossession and the ongoing erasure of Indigenous epistemologies. His participation in miart 2025, in collaboration with the Peruvian gallery CRISIS, marks the continuation of an international trajectory that has brought his work to institutions such as the Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale, the Van Abbemuseum, and upcoming solo exhibitions at The Whitworth in Manchester and MASP in São Paulo.
Fig. 7
Poetry
The golden hues in Gwenn Thomas’ works are not applied pigments but the result of a precise gesture in the darkroom. Working with photographic emulsion and developer, she paints light onto unexposed paper, allowing its latent warmth – the natural tone of the paper itself – to emerge through chemical reaction. The series on view at EXILE’s booth (EUR 10.000, excl. VAT), made in 2022, is intimate and finite: produced from a single remaining box of vintage paper, each piece carries the risk and finality of its making. Thomas’ process echoes the slow time of analog photography while asserting itself as a kind of painterly alchemy.
EXILE also presents drawings by Katsuko Miyamoto, including a rarely seen 1972 drawing and a special "string construction" piece (EUR 150.000, excl. VAT), works that hover between drawing, architecture, and sculpture. Miyamoto's relationship to site-specificity is crucial. One wall piece, originally conceived for a brick wall in 1970s Manhattan, is shown here through a system not unlike that used by Sol LeWitt: the work exists as a certificate and set of instructions, executed with painstaking fidelity by institutions. Yet as the KW Institute in Berlin prepares a major exhibition this October, questions arise: what happens when the original site – or even the brick dimensions – no longer exist? What compromises are permissible in the face of historical accuracy?
As the Triennale Milano celebrates its centenary, the institution dedicates a major exhibition to John Giorno, the poet, activist, and architect of one of the most radical systems of cultural production of the 20th century. Giorno’s practice, born in the heat of New York’s underground scene of which both Thomas and Miyamoto are also part, resonates powerfully in today’s Milan, where art is increasingly caught between public service and market logic. Spread across Cuore, the Triennale’s research and archive center, and the Scalone d’Onore, the exhibition unpacks Giorno’s fierce commitment to democratizing poetry. Highlights include the groundbreaking Dial-a-Poem installation, a pre-digital platform that allowed anyone to access poetry via telephone, and his Perfect Flowers series, where words bloom with visual force.
Over a hundred archival materials – posters, letters, flyers, video clips – trace a network of friendships and collaborations with figures such as Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, and Laurie Anderson. But this is no nostalgic tribute. Giorno’s Poetry Systems functioned as an alternative infrastructure: collective, queer, anti-commercial. Giorno rejected the commodification of language and offered new means for artistic distribution – spanning phones, stages, cassette tapes, and walls.Throughout the show, Giorno’s materials are juxtaposed with Triennale’s own archives, inviting dialogue between two histories, one institutional, one insurgent. A free tattoo session of Giorno’s poems caps the program, ensuring that his words, once again, become part of the (literal) body politic.
Closing the week of collective memory and speculative futures that shaped this year’s miart discursive mesh, Yukinori Yanagi’s "ICARUS," curated by Vicente Todolí and Fiammetta Griccioli, reverberates with a sobering grace. Staged between the monumental works of Tarek Atoui and Anselm Kiefer at Pirelli HangarBicocca, the exhibition acts as both anchor and beacon. It is a rare retrospective of one of Japan’s most quietly radical artists, returning to Italy more than three decades after his iconic intervention at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Yanagi, who has long made his home on the island of Momoshima, far from Japan’s urban power centers, creates works that breathe and decay, that traverse soil, borders, and political histories.
Viewers walk around displaced flags. Uniluminated containers turn into metaphors of global trauma. Sand drawings erode over time. As for the title of the exhibition, it sits uncomfortably close to the event horizon of our current wars, as global power structures continue to mutate, clinging to the illusion of control. Yanagi’s art, in contrast, dissolves such illusions. His materials – ants, oil drums, rusted scaffolding – reject permanence and demand a different kind of attention: one that is sustained, attentive, and, yes, friendly. In light of miart 2025’s theme Among Friends, the darkness of the halls of "ICARUS," becomes a meditative colophon offered to those who give themselves to navigate our daily ruins together.
- Footnotes
Disclaimer:
For the first time, Arts of the Working Class is disclosing prices in a review. This gesture is a deliberate attempt to introduce, using a class-conscious lens, money – often the unspoken imperative of fairs and commercial events – into our critical discourse.
Images:
Cover: John Giorno with Dial-A-Poem telephones, c. 1969. Courtesy of Giorno Poetry Systems
Fig. 1 - Letter from the artists to the government. Photo by María Inés Plaza Lazo
Fig. 2 - Ugo Rondinone's Nude (X), 2010. Wax, earth, pigments, 77.5 cm x 123 x 70.5 cm. Photo by María Inés Plaza Lazo
Fig. 3 - Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's Il Quarto Stato, 1901, at the GAM Milano. Photo by María Inés Plaza Lazo
Fig. 4 - Installation view, Sanna Helena Berger, Cecilie Norgaard, miart 2025, courtesy of artists and Matteo Cantarella and Shahin Zarinbal
Fig. 5 - Cressià Mucuazi's composition of fabrics and Judith Hopf's rain wallpaper at Kaufmann Repetto. Photo by María Inés Plaza Lazo
Fig. 6 - Installation view, Tolia Astakhishvili, Thea Gvetadze, Ser Serpas at LC Queisser's booth, miart 2025, courtesy of artists and LC Queisser
Fig. 7 - Kazuko Miyamoto, Untitled, 1972, string and nails, 230 x 205 x 1,5 cm, courtesy of artist and EXILE
