Utagawa Kuniyoshi - Fantasy, Heroism and Irony

From 24 October 2026 to 21 February 2027 (first part) and from 24 February to 20 June 2027 (second part), Palazzo Poggi hosts the exhibition Utagawa Kuniyoshi - Fantasy, Heroism and Irony.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), one of the most inventive and exuberant image-makers of the East, is one of the great masters of ukiyo-e.

Over a career spanning almost fifty years, driven by an insatiable curiosity, he explored a wide range of subjects and created countless images. The public rewarded him for this: he became one of the most popular Japanese artists of his century.

The exhibition is divided into two successive displays, with a change in the works on view, and presents more than sixty prints and drawings. They are splendid combinations of lines and colours taking the form of male and female warriors and heroes, kabuki actors, ghosts, visions, monsters, deities portrayed with good-natured irreverence, women from every social class, poets of the past, sumo wrestlers, caricatures and parodies, and animals depicted in human attitudes.
Kuniyoshi’s genius knew no limits, and his imaginative art benefited from the collaboration of extraordinarily skilled engravers and printers, who contributed significantly to the appeal of ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

The works belong to the collections of the Centro Studi d'Arte Estremo-Orientale and the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna and are on loan to the University of Bologna.