Mario Schifano - A volo di uccello
Mario Schifano - A volo di uccello
Works on canvas and paper, 1960s - 1990s
curated by Federico Sardella
ART D2 - modern and contemporary art is pleased to present the exhibition Mario Schifano. A volo di uccello, curated by Federico Sardella, on view from April 14 to May 12, 2026, at the gallery’s premises on Via Aristide de Togni 23, Milan.
The exhibition brings together a selection of works on canvas and paper produced between the 1960s and the 1990s, offering a coherent and critically grounded survey of the practice of Mario Schifano, one of the leading figures in postwar Italian art.
All works on display and reproduced in the catalogue are registered with the Archivio Mario Schifano in Rome.
The exhibition itinerary opens with emblematic works from the 1960s, including A volo di uccello (1963), in which the transformation of the pictorial surface into a visual field and signifying dispositif becomes evident, poised between the nullification and reactivation of the image. In this phase, Schifano’s research articulates a radical departure from Informalism: gesture is attenuated, materiality rarefied, and painting expands into an optical and communicative dimension, in dialogue with the languages of contemporaneity.
The exhibition further documents a shift toward a pictorial practice that engages directly with photographic and cinematic mediation, as seen in works from the mid-1960s and 1970s, including A la Balla (1965), Motore a colori (a Picabia) (1965), and pieces on photographic supports such as Film (1978).
In these works, the image emerges as an unstable trace of a mediated vision, wherein references to the historical avant-gardes and to mass visual culture are articulated through processes of translation and iconographic re-elaboration.
The exhibition path extends into the 1980s and 1990s, with works such as Veduta (1987), Campo Basso (1988), and Il seduttore (1995), in which landscape appears as a mental construct and a form of visual memory, the outcome of a continuous interplay between direct perception and technical reproduction. In these works, painting does not merely represent reality, but rather registers its modes of appearance in an age marked by the proliferation of images.
The exhibition as a whole underscores how Schifano’s practice may be read as an ongoing reflection on the image—not as a static object, but as a dynamic phenomenon and perceptual dispositif, traversed by tensions between presence and absence, memory and inscription, painting and media.
The exhibition runs until May 12, 2026
Address: Via Aristide De Togni 23 – 20123 Milan
Phone: +39 02 39440381
Opening hours:
Monday–Friday: 9:30 am–12:30 pm / 2:30 pm–6:30 pm
Saturday and Sunday by appointment
Metro, bus: MM2 (Green Line) and MM4 (Blue Line), Sant’Ambrogio stop
Bus 50, Via San Vittore stop
Admission: Free