Irony on show at MAMbo in Bologna
Ph: Asch58, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fashion and art have always made irony a skilful tool to describe the world and the surrounding reality. This is why the exhibition “Facile ironia. L’ironia nell’arte italiana tra XX e XXI secolo“ (Easy Irony. Irony in Italian Art between the 20th and 21st Centuries), on show at Bologna’s MAMbo museum of modern art, assumes, for us at Galleria Cavour and for all costume enthusiasts, an even more interesting relevance.
Just like fashion designers, who are often the first to take themselves less seriously and to provoke by desecrating or overturning social labels, the artists of the last two centuries have also made lightness and irreverence a true art. This is well demonstrated by this precious exhibition curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni: the show hosts, in fact, over 100 works by 79 great Italian artists, including names of the calibre of Giorgio De Chirico, Maurizio Cattelan and Piero Manzoni.
During the tour, visitors will be able to appreciate all sorts of declensions of irony through thematic areas that recount its different nuances: from paradox to nonsense, from political and institutional criticism to the art of play through black humour.
Among the installations, photographs, paintings and illustrations, it becomes clear how irony, throughout history, has always been a precious tool for recounting current events, unhinging society’s convictions, offering new points of view, challenging certainties and offering alternative interpretations. Although it manifests itself in different forms, its is a universal and transversal language that becomes indispensable for unhinging atavistic social certainties, overturning norms and questioning the strong powers.
In times of uncertain topicality such as ours, this exhibition, which opened in February and runs until 7 September 2025, and which spans decades of history and culture with extreme ease, takes on an important symbolic value. The advice, therefore, for citizens and tourists alike is not to miss it.
Ph: Asch58, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons