What to see for ART CITY 2026

The fourteenth edition of ART CITY Bologna will take place from 5 to 8 February 2026, offering a rich series of events dedicated to contemporary art. Promoted by the Municipality of Bologna, with the support of BolognaFiere and with the artistic direction of Lorenzo Balbi, director of the MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art of Bologna of the Civic Museums Sector of the Municipality of Bologna, the initiative will take place alongside Arte Fiera (7–9 February).

If you are looking for the must-see events of the institutional programme of Art City 2026, this is the article you need to read.

Special Program ART CITY Bologna 2026: contemporary art in the venues of the University

The Special Program The Body of Language (5–8 February 2026) is inspired by the homonymous text by Giorgio Agamben, curated by Caterina Molteni, and features a special collaboration with the city institution that more than any other is dedicated to knowledge, dialogue and change: the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna.

The project pays tribute to this cultural heritage with a contemporary art itinerary that runs through the venues of the University, some of which are open to the public for the occasion, featuring works by international artists (5–8 February 2026):

• Giulia Deval, PITCH. Notes on Vocal Intonation, Aula Alessandro Ghigi of the former Institute of Zoology
• Mike Kelley, Day Is Done, Atrium of the former Faculty of Engineering
• Ana Mendieta, Flower Person, Flower Body & Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures), Sala della Boschereccia at Palazzo Hercolani
• Alexandra Pirici, Rejoin, Anatomical Theatre of Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio (in italian)
• Augustas Serapinas, Chair for the Invigilator, Federico Zeri Foundation 
• Jenna Sutela, nimiia cètiï, Educational Workshop of the Navile District
• Nora Turato, To the Best of My Knowledge, Aula Magna of the University Library of Bologna (in italian)

ART CITY Bologna 2026: exhibitions and events in the Civic Museums

• Sergia Avveduti, Ombra Custode, Civic Museum of Industrial Art and Davia Bargellini Gallery (15 January – 1 March)
  The exhibition creates an ideal dialogue between the museum’s permanent collection and the creations of Sergia Avveduti.

• Concetto Pozzati, Da e per Morandi, Casa Morandi (17 January – 15 March)
  On display are several works by Concetto Pozzati (Vo’, 1935 – Bologna, 2017) dedicated to Giorgio Morandi.

• Alessandro Moreschini, Ornament Is No Longer a Crime, Civic Medieval Museum (18 January – 22 March)
  The works weave themselves among the historical artefacts, establishing an osmotic, at times secret dialogue, in which light, colour and decorative rhythm become bridges between different eras and sensibilities.

• John Giorno, The Performative Word, MAMbo (5 February – 3 May)
  The exhibition is the first major Italian retrospective, staged in the Sala delle Ciminiere, celebrating one of the most radical and visionary protagonists of contemporary culture.

• Mattia Moreni, The Bologna Anthology, 1965, MAMbo (30 January – 31 May)
  The exhibition recalls the major 1965 show organised at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna (now MAMbo), which marked the artist’s first solo exhibition in a public institution.

• Flavio de Marco, Screen Life, Villa delle Rose (1 February – 29 March)
  De Marco’s research explores the screen as the new landscape of the contemporary world, moving across different genres of painting: the works traverse figuration and abstraction to represent the experience of space reconfigured by the new digital society.

• Etel Adnan and Giorgio Morandi, Vibrations, Museo Morandi (21 January – 3 May)
  Both artists, influenced by Paul Cézanne, conceive painting not as mere representation, but as a visual experience capable of narrating reality through light, tone and time.

• Emanuele Becheri, SCULPTURES, Municipal Art Collections (25 January – 15 March)
  The relationship between Becheri’s sculptures and the museum’s architecture creates a pathway marked by pauses and confrontations, in which the past of the collections and the contemporaneity of the artistic intervention reflect one another.

• Eva Marisaldi – Enrico Serotti, For Various Reasons – Part II, International Museum and Library of Music (22 January – 22 February)
  The intervention conceived by the artists begins, as they state, “from a disordered series of reflections on music and sound, referring to various periods”.

• Simone Martinetto - Artificial Intelligence. Creative Intelligence, Museum of Industrial Heritage (7 February – 1 March 2026)
  Drawing inspiration in an unprecedented way from the museum collections, the students coordinated by photographer Simone Martinetto challenged the algorithm: they identified keywords to generate artificial images, later using them as a counterpoint for their own manual creations.
  

• Sonia Lanzi - Unlikely Monuments. In dialogue. Merini / Carducci, Casa Carducci (30 January - 29 March 2026)
  Solo exhibition by Sonia Lenzi curated by Eleonore Grassi for Casa Carducci Contemporanea, promoted by Casa Carducci in collaboration with the Civic Museum of the Risorgimento and  Italian Women’s Library, FAF / Research Centre for Photography, Art and Feminisms. Starting from the ongoing series Unlikely Monuments. Excerpt from the catalogue, Sonia Lenzi brings places, represented figures and viewers into dialogue.
  

ART CITY Bologna 2026 in historic palaces and institutional venues

• More Than This, National Art Gallery of Bologna (31 January – 6 April 2026)
  An exhibition curated by Daniele Capra offering a critical survey of Atelier F, the most significant painting school to emerge on the contemporary Italian scene in recent years.

• Michael E. Smith - C C, Palazzo Bentivoglio (30 January – 26 April 2026)
  Solo exhibition by Michael E. Smith (Detroit, 1977), curated by Simone Menegoi and Tommaso Pasquali, one of the most radical and influential American artists of his generation, who has redefined the boundaries of sculpture and installation, moving between minimalism and residue, absence and presence.

• “Futurism” and “Return to Order” in the Collections of the Fondazione Carisbo, Casa Saraceni (22 January – 26 July 2026)
  The exhibition brings together a wide selection of works from the first half of the twentieth century from the Foundation’s Art and History Collections, focusing on the themes of “Futurism” and the “Return to Order”.

• Jacopo Mazzonelli, Persistence, Lercaro Museum of Art (22 January – 8 March 2026)
  The exhibition, accompanied by contributions by Charles Moore and Saverio Verini, consists of a new installation created specifically for the Museum space.

• IOCOSE - Pointing Nemo. Beyond space towards the abyss, CUBO UNIPOL – Porta Europa and Torre Unipol (6 February – 26 May 2026)
  At the heart of the project, curated by Federica Patti, is NewSpace, the movement that proposes the colonisation of space as the only possible future for humanity.

• Jeff Well - Jeff Wall. Living, Working, Surviving, Fondazione MAST (7 November 2025 – 8 March 2026)
  The exhibition path, curated by Urs Stahel, presents twenty-eight works by Wall, including lightboxes and large-format colour and black-and-white prints made between 1980 and 2021, from private collections and international museums.

• I preferiti di Marino Capitolo II | Opus Mundi, Golinelli Arts and Sciences Centre (6 February – 28 June 2026)
  The exhibition presents over fifty works that tell the story of Cavalier Golinelli’s inexhaustible curiosity and his gaze directed towards the world and the future.

• do ut do 2026 – Identity, various venues (January – February 2026)
  The 2026 edition of do ut do, an initiative founded by Alessandra D’Innocenzo in 2012 to support the activities of the Fondazione Hospice MT. Chiantore Seràgnoli of Bologna, focuses on the theme of identity, promoting a series of exhibitions and events taking place between January and February in some of the city’s most important and prestigious institutional and museum venues:

1. Joan Crous, Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio (29 January – 21 February 2026)
2. “100 Years of Nino Migliori.” The Mannequins. Identity, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna (22 January – 21 February 2026)
3. Oliver D’Auria, Teatro Arena del Sole (21 January – 8 March 2026)
4. Lorenzo Puglisi, Opificio Golinelli and PwC Italia – via Farini (6 January – 1 March 2026)
5. Paolo Pellegrin with EGS, Arte Fiera – do ut do space in collaboration with Spazio C21 (5 – 8 February 2026)
6. Group exhibition, Palazzo Pepoli – Museum of the History of Bologna (4 February – 8 March 2026)
   Group exhibition of works by Victor Fotso Nyie, Geraldina Khatchikian, Fiorenza Pancino, Stefano W. Pasquini, Lorenzo Puglisi, Giorgia Severi, in collaboration with galleries P420 and BoA Spazio Arte.

• MASBEDO, Resto, Oratorio San Filippo Neri  (1 – 8 February 2026)
  Solo exhibition by MASBEDO with a critical text by Alessandro Rabottini, promoted by Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, in collaboration with Mismaonda. The sea belongs to those who know how to wait in silence for a sign. And precisely because it is available to everyone, in reality it belongs to no one: it remains free, impetuous, foreign. The idea of the artist duo MASBEDO stems from a precious thought: art as rescue and hospitality, as a language capable of evoking without violence, with modesty and respect, a theme that painfully returns in daily news reporting.

• Quinto Ghermandi, Marco Di Giovanni, Giulia Poppi, Palazzo Paltroni – 3 X Sculpture, Fondazione del Monte (30 January – 13 March 2026)
  Exhibition curated by Maura Pozzati and Maria Katia Tufano. The exhibition aims to bring into dialogue three sculptors from different generations, all trained at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna.

• Driant Zeneli - Falling, former Church of San Barbaziano (5 – 8 February 2026)
  Exhibition curated by Video Sound Art, Patrizia Cirino and Denise Tamborrino, promoted by the National Museums of Bologna – Regional Directorate of National Museums of Emilia-Romagna in collaboration with AICS Bologna. The narrative, marked by the six Bengali seasons, centres on a white peacock in love with its own tear. Through multiple levels of interpretation, the work addresses existential, ecological and political themes – such as the protests of the “July 2024 Revolution” in which more than a thousand people lost their lives – shaping a magical realism that opens up unconventional imaginative spaces.

• Francisco Tropa, Miss America, Conference Hall of Banca di Bologna – Palazzo De’ Toschi (3 February – 1 March 2026)
  Exhibition curated by Simone Menegoi, promoted by Banca di Bologna in collaboration with Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris. It is the first major exhibition in Italy by Portuguese artist Francisco Tropa (Lisbon, 1968) and takes its title from the main work, Miss America, a new creation combining installation and performance.

• All of a sudden, Zu.Art Garden of the Arts – Fondazione Zucchelli (5 February – 31 July 2026)
  Group exhibition by students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, curated by Parsec. The works converge in a field of reflection that investigates what is about to happen and what might change, the territory in which things take shape, transform and remain in balance.

• Daniela Comani, Reversal Exercise. Rewriting Practices, Cloister of Santa Cristina – Sala del Timpano (4 – 10 February 2026)
  Solo exhibition promoted by CDD – Centro Documentazione delle Donne di Bologna, in collaboration with Galleria Studio G7, curated by Orlando aps. In Reversal Exercise (2024) we see a computer screen and observe a cursor that changes gender in real time in news reports on femicides. Masculine becomes feminine, perpetrator becomes victim and vice versa.

• Disseminating and Sharing, Palazzo Malvezzi de’ Medici (7 – 8 February 2026)
  Photography exhibition curated by Vanna Romualdi, promoted by Istituzione Villa Smeraldi – Museum of Peasant Civilisation, in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna. The exhibition proposes a symbolic and physical crossing of the exterior and interior spaces of Palazzo Malvezzi de’ Medici, headquarters of the Metropolitan City of Bologna and urban extension of the Museum of Peasant Civilisation of Bentivoglio.

• Claudia Amatruda, A Body Engineered by Water, Fondazione Carlo Gajani (5 – 8 February 2026)
  Solo exhibition promoted by Fondazione Carlo Gajani, curated by Sara Papini and Fuori Sedia in collaboration with Radio Città Fujiko, Parsec, Fuorisedia Podcast, Fatavideo, Juliet Art Magazine, Cantiere Bologna. In a dimly lit installation, the house-studio becomes an almost theatrical environment: the rooms remain dark while beams of light isolate photographs, sculptures, installations and video performances, allowing for slow and physical observation.

• Michelangelo Pistoletto - From Cittadellarte to Statodellarte, Palazzo Boncompagni (3 February – 3 June 2026)
  Solo exhibition curated by Silvia Evangelisti, promoted by Fondazione Palazzo Boncompagni in collaboration with Galleria Cavour 1959. Under this title unfolds a journey including historical works and projects spanning more than sixty years of the artist’s research, centred on the relationship between art, society and politics.
  
  
• Lea Colliva VS Mirta Carroli, Museo Ottocento Bologna (5 – 8 February 2026)
  Only during the Art City days, Museo Ottocento Bologna presents a special tribute to Lea Colliva: in dialogue with Colliva, the original sketches of the large sculpture created by Mirta Carroli, one of the most important contemporary Italian sculptors of monumental works, will be displayed.

• Artisti Marziali - Art City Edition, Alchemilla – Palazzo Vizzani (2, 7 and 8 February 2026)
  Artisti Marziali is an experimental format curated by Veronica Santi in which two artists interview each other live. These are encounters-clashes that do not involve the mediation of a journalist or an art critic.

• Simone Miccichè - Corpo Tessuto 01, eXtraBO (5 – 15 February 2026)
  Exhibition curated by Federica Fiumelli and Francesco Liggieri. The exhibition presents a new and significant selection of works by Simone Miccichè, a Bolognese artist whose pictorial research focuses on fabric as a symbolic, linguistic and bodily place.
• Christian Boltanski - About Ustica, Museum for the Memory of Ustica (5 - 8 February 2026)
• Laurent Lafolie and Clément Mitéran, Échos des visages, Lercaro Museum of Art (16 September 2025 – 15 February 2026)
  An exhibition offering the opportunity to present the most current proposals in the field of contemporary photography. Curated by Giovanni Gardini and Michel Poivert.
• Claudio Parmiggiani and Piero Pizzi Cannella, San Giorgio in Poggiale – Library of Art and History (5 - 8 February 2026)
  With works by Claudio Parmiggiani and Piero Pizzi Cannella in the Library of San Giorgio in Poggiale. Special openings and guided tours during the Art City days.

• Arianna Pace, Things Do Not Speak Because They Do Not Know What to Do with Language, Luigi Bombicci Educational Museum and Officina Artierranti (4 – 15 February 2026)
  Solo exhibition by Arianna Pace (Pesaro, 1996), curated by Artierranti and Bianca Basile. Arianna Pace’s research is based on an interest in living beings: it focuses on observing the natural world as an archival practice, which becomes for her a form of knowledge and discovery.

• Quayola, Donatella Nicolini, Mamà Dots, CODEX – the echo of wireless becomes digital thought, former Church of San Mattia (2 – 28 February 2026)
  Exhibition curated by Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi and the Comitato Nazionale Marconi.150. The exhibition proposes a cultural and spiritual bridge between the origins of modern communication and the ethical challenges of Artificial Intelligence.