The ongoing exhibition series Gli anni is dedicated to exploring episodes in the history of art from the most recent decades in Naples. The Madre collection thus engages with major public and private collections—primarily from the city—to evoke emblematic works, showcasing the artistic moments and creations that have shaped this region.
The title Gli anni [The Years] refers to the novel of the same name by writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, in which the description of photographs and the memory of key moments over a single lifetime come together to form both an autobiographical fresco and a collective chronicle. The novel suggests that private images and memories are destined to dissolve into the flow of history; the exhibition, on the other hand, proposes the viewing of artworks as an antidote to this disappearance. Having transcended the urgency of the moment in which they were conceived, the works continue to narrate not only their own aesthetic and linguistic exploration but also the context in which they were produced and exhibited. Likewise, the collections that host them may be understood as repositories of stories, events, and layers of shared experience.
Like memories, the narrative constructed over each chapter of Gli anni does not follow a linear chronological progression but unfolds through various moments and episodes, marked by posters indicating the years in which the selected works were first exhibited in Campania. With this third chapter, the project takes on a widespread dimension throughout the museum spaces, involving not only the second floor but also the entrance, the Sala Madre, and part of the Sala Colonne.
The exhibition path brings together works of extraordinary historical and artistic significance, capable of offering layered and deeply contemporary interpretations of the cultural, social, and geopolitical transformations of recent decades, like The Green Coffin (2006) by Thomas Hirschhorn and The Sick Child (2000) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. The exhibition also devotes particular attention to linguistic and interdisciplinary experimentation, through the reconstruction of the video exhibition Audience 0.01 (1993); an account of the magazine “Collant, i giorni dell’arte attuale“, through Giulia Piscitelli’s archive; a focus on Rosa Panaro’s sculptural research; and Valerio Adami’s set design for The Flying Dutchman at the Teatro San Carlo in 2003. Selected highlights from the Madre collection are also featured, including works by Carlo Alfano and Francesco Clemente, as well as recent acquisitions by Elisa Giardina Papa, Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio, and Jordan Wolfson. As in every chapter, a Neapolitan artist is also invited to engage with the museum’s collection to conceive a curated room: for this edition, Lorenzo Coletta builds a project around Nanni Balestrini’s Tristanoil (2012), placing the work in dialogue with the research of sound artists from different generations. Gli anni. Capitolo 3 finally broadens its focus to artistic and curatorial practices active today, reinforcing the idea of the museum not only as an archive of memory but as a living, evolving organism. In this context, Peter Fischli and Stefania Carlotti make their debut in Naples, alongside the curatorial project Soundshapes, curated by Carolin Köchling and Julia Grosse, which presents a previously unseen work by Hira Nabi.
Building on previous editions, the public program accompanies the exhibition with talks, conversations, and tours, reinforcing the museum’s role as a place for critical discourse and transdisciplinary dialogue.
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