Launched in 1931 to espouse Italian fascist cultural supremacy and rebranded in 1948 to signal a regime change, the quadrennial carries a complicated legacy. This year, five curators frame Italian art of the 21st century through five themes: artistic independence, collective autarky, image culture, the body and self-portraiture – sections that intermingle in their shared concern with creative sovereignty, fascism’s enemy.
It’s better to forgo the map: these sections prove intuitive, even when unlabelled. Curator Francesco Bonami’s ‘Memory Full: A Room of One’s Own’ eschews a theme, instead suggesting a preference for market darlings like Cenci. Bonami’s artists are all isolated, yielding that distinctive art-fair-booth sensation of works on display for purchase. Bea Scaccia’s opulent paintings, Shafei Xia’s ceramic tiger heads and Lupo Borgonovo’s tapestry-like ink drawings seem to suffocate in their white-walled enclaves, erected for the quadrennial. These vignettes are too brief to feel intimate, save for Jem Perucchini’s devotional portrait The Stranger (Dionysus) (2025), which glows in its velvety black cubicle.
Francesco Stocchi’s deliberately untitled section features an even higher concentration of renowned talents, yet the tone shifts: Stocchi conferenced with his nine artists to shape their presentation collectively, from flooring to wall text. Groans from Arcangelo Sassolino’s hydraulic steel claw, Hunger (2008), fill one space, its six appendages curling into precarious positions before collapsing with a crash so loud docents wear protective headphones. Quieter moments also enthral. Martino Gamper’s ‘seating choreography’, Sitzung (2023), positions chairs before works by five artists, including Pietro Roccasalva’s moody still lifes and a two-part pastel and charcoal abstraction by Lulù Nuti. Visitors sat and watched dancer Sofia Magnani twirl silently to music in her earbuds – one of many performances programmed for the run. Juxtaposed, these two sections illustrate what happens when artists, rather than egos, lead.
In Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera’s ‘The Time of Images: Images Out of Control?’, 11 photographers speak to our era’s visual deluge. Black and white snapshots from Andrea Camiolo’s series ‘The Manhattan Project’ (2022–ongoing) mimic found photographs from an abandoned American military base in Sicily but are AI-generated based on Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s 1977 photobook Evidence. Meanwhile, Teresa Giannico’s colourful images Must Have. Essentials for a Creative Space and Must Have. Painting Collection (both 2025) appear AI-made. In reality, they document dioramas constructed from fast fashion advertisements for aspirational artist studios. Normally, I prefer sparse wall texts like those throughout this quadrennial. Here, the lack of context activates a hallmark of today’s globalized image culture: viewers must do their own research.
Alessandra Troncone’s section on ‘The Unfinished Body’ is the show’s flashiest. One gallery glows with an ad for Emilio Vavarella’s Lifeweave.app (2025), which invites users to submit saliva and purchase tapestries visualizing their DNA. Nearby, a speaker and microphone mounted on robotic arms spar and sniff each other in Roberto Pugliese’s Industrial Equilibrium (2024). Their arresting courtship gestures at homeostasis, but ultimately lapses into pareidolia.
Agnes Questionmark offers deeper resonance with life. Exiled in Domestic Life (2025) suspends a candy-coloured aquatic specimen from a chrome apparatus that supports seven video screens and a table featuring sketches and handwritten letters. The installation embodies Questionmark’s fantastical search for a sea monster, an allegory for her self-discovery as a trans woman. In a quadrennial rife with spectacle, this monument retains an earnest undercurrent. Excitement and substance, it insists, aren’t mutually exclusive.
The 18th Rome quadrennial ‘Fantastica’ will be on view at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, until 18 January 2026
