As Milan pulses with creativity during Art Week, one exhibition quietly yet powerfully rises above the noise: Ugo Rondinone. terrone at GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano. On view from April 1 to July 6, 2025, this marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the city — arriving at just the right moment to offer space for reflection, identity, and memory amid a fast-paced, image-saturated art scene.

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Curated by Caroline Corbetta, terrone is more than a retrospective — it’s a deeply personal, intimate, and timely exploration of Ugo Rondinone’s Italian heritage and the universal experiences of displacement and migration. Born in Switzerland to Italian parents from Matera, and based in New York since the late 1990s, Rondinone boldly reclaims terrone — a historically charged, often derogatory term for southern Italians — and transforms it into a symbol of belonging, resilience, and memory.

 

The exhibition unfolds across the evocative spaces of GAM Milano, a museum renowned for its 19th- and early 20th-century Italian art collection. This rich historical context becomes an essential voice in the dialogue Rondinone constructs. At its emotional core is Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s masterpiece The Fourth Estate, a monumental painting that symbolizes the dignity of labor and the march of the working class.

 

In a city like Milan — long a magnet for internal migration and social transformation — Rondinone responds to this iconic image with works that echo the stories of countless Italian migrants, including that of his own family. Through sculptures, installations, and text-based pieces, terrone extends the themes of The Fourth Estate, adding personal, poetic, and even spiritual layers to the ongoing conversation around identity, migration, and collective memory.

What makes this exhibition particularly resonant is the bridge it builds between Rondinone’s contemporary practice and GAM’s classical collection. This is not a contrast for contrast’s sake, but an emotionally charged dialogue in which past and present coexist, confront, and enrich one another. It recalls curatorial approaches seen in European institutions like Vienna’s Belvedere or Paris’s Petit Palais, where contemporary art is meaningfully placed within historic settings. Yet here, the dialogue takes on a distinctly Milanese tone, shaped by the city’s layered identity as both a keeper of tradition and a stage for evolving cultural narratives.

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Beyond its visual and historical impact, terrone serves as a poetic meditation on origins and futures, individual stories and shared identities. Amid the whirlwind of Milan Art Week — a carousel of openings, panels, and performances — this exhibition feels like a whispered confession, a quiet yet urgent reminder of where we come from and where we might be heading.

 

It’s one of those shows that stays with you — lingering in the mind, haunting your thoughts long after you’ve stepped back into Milan’s crowded streets and neon-lit nights. Terrone doesn’t just participate in Milan Art Week; it transforms it into something more grounded, thoughtful, and emotionally resonant.

 

For those seeking more than spectacle, Ugo Rondinone. terrone at GAM Milano offers a rare kind of honesty — rooted in memory, identity, and the quiet, enduring strength of those who came before us.