From February 6 to September 7, 2025, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, part of the Settore Musei Civici Bologna, a major group exhibition will take place in Bologna. Titled Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo (Easy Irony. Irony in Italian Art between the 20th and 21st Centuries), it will be curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni. 

The showcase will be part of ART CITY Bologna 2025. Designed for the spaces of the Sala delle Ciminiere, with over 100 works and archival documents by more than 70 artists, the exhibition covers a period of about 70 years, from the 1950s to the present day, with the aim of tracing the history of Italian art through the theme of irony. 

A common thread running through decades of Italian artistic production, irony emerges as a recurring aesthetic and critical strategy capable of referring to a deep meaning without openly expressing it. This device, used for centuries to unmask false certainties and propose new representations, has found particularly fertile ground in the Italian context, and artists of different generations have used its destabilizing power to question established paradigms. 

The title of the exhibition, ironic in itself, reminds us of the apparent simplicity of this phenomenon, while at the same time revealing its intrinsic complexity. A contradiction that becomes a play in itself, inviting the audience to question the nature of language and its commonplaces and, at the same time, the ways in which these influence our observation and how we read the world around us. 

From the 1950s to the present day, with Surrealism and Metaphysical painting as important precedents, Facile Ironia traces the history of art in Italy through irony as a critical and imaginative tool. The exhibition is organized around major themes that help to illustrate the different variants of irony and its transhistorical nature: irony as paradox and its relationship to play, irony as the practice of nonsense, irony as a feminist weapon in the critique of patriarchy and the Italian social order, and its role in political mobilization and as a form of institutional critique. Finally, a touch of black humour hovers over the museum spaces, running through several sections of the exhibition: an energy that seems to be the opposite of cheerfulness, leading us to face the contradictions of existence in a cynical and irreverent way. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the same name, published by Società Editrice Allemandi, with texts by the curators Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni, the exhibition designer Filippo Bisagni and guests Jacopo Galimberti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Caterina Molteni, Loredana Parmesani, Cesare Pietroiusti, Francesco Poli, Valentina Tanni and Elvira Vannini, who were invited to explore the various sections of the exhibition.

Feature image credit: Veduta della mostra Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo. Foto di Carlo Favero. © Francesco Vezzoli, by Siae 2025; © Antonio Donghi, by Siae 2025; © Giorgio De Chirico, by Siae 2025, © Antonio Donghi, by Siae 2025.