After the summer break, the autumn season started with several exhibitions in Bologna. Besides five galleries, also the Museo Lercaro presents currently three shows. More galleries and institutions will follow in the next days.
Galleria Studio Cenacchi: Vibecke Hetland – Quanto sarà mai lato il sole?
LABS Contemporary Art: People I Know
Museo Lercaro: Marco De Luca – La Superficie dell’Anima
CAR Gallery: Alessandro Scarabello – Heretical Exercises
P420: What the Eye Brought Back
Museo Lercaro: Post-Scriptum
Galleria Studio G7: Franco Guerzoni – Fuori dal dipinto
Museo Lercaro: Clément Mitéran & Laurent Lafolie – Échos des Visages
Upcoming exhibitions
Vibecke Hetland – Quanto sarà mai lato il sole?
11 September – 8 October 2025
Galleria Studio Cenacchi
Via Santo Stefano 63, Bologna
www.studiocenacchi.com
With ten works from 2023 to 2025, the Norwegian artist Vibecke Hetland transforms the story and the music of Mozart’s famous opera “The Magic Flute” into images. These paintings and embroideries are more than a “simple” illustration, but live their own lives, which resound the music by colours, material and composition. While the huge paintings vibrate in bright colours, the embroideries are delicate and float in the space. Here the contrast between light and dark tones is predominant. Unfortunately, the show will be closed soon, though there will be new exhibitions at the gallery Studio Cenacchi and its annexe (Via Castiglione 81, Bologna) later this month.
Lucia Cristiani – Finja Sander – Elisabeth Sonneck
24 September – 1 November 2025
LABS Contemporary Art
Via Santo Stefano 38, Bologna
www.labsgallery.it
The LABS gallery invited three female artists from different generations and background to reflect on the relationship between body, material and space. Lucia Cristiani (Milano 1991) creates rather smaller sculptures and pictures with an organic background. Finja Sander (Hildesheim 1996) uses everyday objects and points to the vulnerability of the material. Whereas Elisabeth Sonneck (Bünde 1962) sets up extensive installations. In common they have a sensitivity for their chosen material, underlining the fragility and at the same time the resistance of it.
11 September – 2 November 2025
Museo Lercaro
Riva di Reno 57, Bologna
www.fondazionelercaro.it
With gold elements in his mosaics Marco De Luca recall Byzantine architectural designs in the same technique. However, his two- and three-dimensional works represent organic, sometimes geometric forms to whom the precious material confers a certain aura: The Surface of the Soul.
27 September – 15 November 2025
CAR Gallery
via Azzo Gardino 14/A, Bologna
www.cargallery.it
Alessandro Scarabello’s paintings in “Heretical Exercises” have a fragile image space, where the protagonists refuse in parts their localisation and deviate from their traditional role. This conscient decision of the painter, to rethink his earlier approach is visible. The pictures are nonconformist and radical; his brushstroke is quick to exploit the colour at the moment of its maximum instability. This freedom of expression becomes possible by the mainly huge canvasses. In “Prometheus escapade” (2025) it seems like a bright yellow figure runs to the left image edge, or is it the fire that he brings to the people?
Herewith Scarabello evades the currently dominant trends of aesthetic. Hence, the title “Heretical Exercises” as an attempt to revolt against the leading practice and focusing on the act of painting itself. Resulting are restless paintings with a fast rhythm, mirroring the uncertainties of our time. The painting of the falling “Icarus” (2022) is a good example. Already fragmented by the split on two canvases, the extremities seem to be in disorder, wrenched, paddling frantically, without finding a grip.
20 September – 15 November 2025
P420
Via Azzo Gardino 9, Bologna
www.p420.it
The exhibition “What the Eye Brought Back” is a kind of travel diary, where the founders of the gallery noted their impressions. However, these impressions are rather visual memories than written notes. These imprinted souvenirs originate from encounters in nearly all continents over the years. Therefore, the chosen artworks are not telling one story to constitute an exhibition. They are not homogenous in subject nor technique and installed in the gallery, they are a kind of illustrated broadsheet. Thus, the artistic expressions are varying from figurative paintings to abstract embroideries, intarsia like works but instead of wood with marble and other precious stones, huge charcoal drawings and sculptural installations by 11 artists from different generations and cultural backgrounds:
Hamra Abbas (1976, Kuwait City, Kuwait – lives and works between Lahore, Pakistan and Boston, USA), Majd Abdel Hamid (1988, Damascus, Syria – lives and works between Beirut, Lebanon and Ramallah, Palestine), Maha Ahmed (1989, Lahore, Pakistan – lives and works in London, UK), Bekhbaatar Enkhtur (1994, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia – lives and works in Turin, Italy), Edgar Calel (1987, Chi Xot, Guatemala – lives and works in Chi Xot, Guatemala), Leonardo Devito (1997, Florence, Italy – lives and works in Turin, Italy), He Xiangyu (1986, Kuandian, China – lives and works between Milan, Italy and Beijing, China), Khaled Jarada (1996, Gaza City, Palestine – lives and works in Paris, France), Xian Kim (1992, Seoul, South Korea – lives and works in Seoul, South Korea), Iva Lulashi (1988, Tirana, Albania – lives and works in Milan, Italy), Brett Charles Seiler (1994, Harare, Zimbabwe – lives and works between Cape Town, South Africa and Leipzig, Germany).
25 September – 16 November 2025
Museo Lercaro
Riva di Reno 57, Bologna
www.fondazionelercaro.it
“Post-Scriptum” offers visitors the rare possibility, to contemplate ancient handwritten documents and scripts coming from the Archivio Arcivescovile (Archbishop’s Archives) of Bologna. Besides witnesses of commercial and personal activities like rentals and testaments, there are also religious guidance’s and profane scripts. Accordingly, some items are richly decorated, some less or not at all.
Two contemporary artworks are opposed to these ancient parchments. The calligrapher Sara Vasini picked up the once common practice of overwriting. She copied Dante’s “Paradiso” on 118 pages but superposed the texts to transfigure it. In contrast, the artist duo Antonello Ghezzi used preexisting, printed sales receipts. This could be a reference to commercial documents in the exhibition, or a hint to the technique of printing. Printing replaced first hand copied books but in the time being – in particular in the computer age – almost all handwritten documentations. Also printed sales receipts are on the verge of disappearing. Antonello Ghezzi re-used and assigned them a documentary if not historic, comparable to the ancient scripts. Moreover, they transport their message “Quello che conta” (“What counts” or in a larger sense “What matters”). Moreover, the by hand painted arrows on the small bills raise the question in which direction we will or should go. This could be addressed strictly personal or to society.
27 settembre – 27 dicembre 2025
Galleria Studio G7
via Val D’Aposa 4/A, Bologna
https://galleriastudiog7.it
With his current exhibition at the Galleria Studio G7, Franco Guerzoni (Modena, 1948) confirms his long-lasting collaboration with the gallery, where he had his first personal show in 1973. Since his early career he explored the limits of painting, to interpret this technique in an individual way by extending these limits continuously and investigating other fields of art like photography. At the same time, he was interested in archaeology and developed the concept of archaeology without restauration. Later he returned to painting in creating wall paintings.
His current technique is based on the use of alabaster, stucco or plaster, partly on panel, highlighted by pigments. For “Fuori dal dipinto” (Outside the painting) he grouped his new creations around one “painting” which was conceived for the gallery. The “archaeological” fragments and other works communicate with the first one in a sensitive way.
At this years’ Bologna art books festival “BOoks” Franco Guerzoni was also represented by the Studio G7 with a special project drawing the attention to his production of artist books.
16 September 2025 – 15 February 2026
Museo Lercaro
Riva di Reno 57, Bologna
www.fondazionelercaro.it
Clément Mitéran and Laurent Lafolie both work on portraits and give them a special quality. Even though the typical form of portrait is recognizable, they blur personal traits, but in different techniques. Lafolie transfers black and white photographs on porcelain tiles. Some superposed, the portrayed appear as shadows on a puzzle of plates and have to be reconstructed by the eye of the contemplator. Whereas the mosaicist Mitéran pixilates the faces by his technique. The results of both artists remind digital art. However, the approach is analogue.
• AF Gallery (Via dei Bersaglieri 5/e, Bologna)
Direzione Intrapresa e Volontà di Resa
Nicola Bizzarri, Francesco Ibba and Francesco Bendini
9 October – 14 November 2025
• Otto Gallery (Via D’Azeglio 55, Bologna)
Altrove o altre volte:
Andrea Facco, Luca Pancrazzi, Lucio Pozzi, Sean Shanahan
11 October – 20 December 2025
• Casa Morandi (Via Fondazza 36, Bologna)
Gary Green – After Morandi
11 October 2025 – 6 January 2026
• Galleria Stefano Forni (Piazza Cavour 2, Bologna)
Carlo Mattioli
11 October 2025
• MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Project Room
(Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 14, Bologna)
Kipras Dubauskas. Pirogenia. Folla e demoni
16 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
• Galleria de’ Foscherari (Via Castiglione 2/b, Bologna)
Pushing the Limits
17 October 2025
• Galleria Enrico Astuni (Via Iacopo Barozzi 3, Bologna)
Ugo La Pietra. La mia territorialità
18 October 2025 – 14 February 2026
• Galleria Studio Cenacchi (Via Santo Stefano 63, Bologna)
Assonanze e Dissonanze Musive
Giuliano Babini, Giovanna Galli, Paolo Racagni
21 October – 31 October 2025
• Galleria Studio Cenacchi annexe (Via Castiglione 81, Bologna)
Attilio Melfi – A1
24 October 2025 – 9 January 2026