MILAN.- Alex Da Corte’s installation Housepainter II (2025) is being presented as part of “Atlas,” the permanent project of Fondazione Prada in Milan. The is on view from Wednesday 28 October 2026 on the eighth floor of the Torre, alongside the artist’s Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022), which, from September 2025 for one year, was in dialogue with Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum (1965–1977), on loan from mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien. Following the comparison with Oldenburg, Da Corte’s two installations can be seen side by side for the first time.
Through solo presentations or unexpected comparisons between works created by international artists between 1960 and 2025, “Atlas” embodies a possible mapping of the ideas and visions that have contributed to the development of Fondazione Prada’s activities from 1993 to the present day. The project was conceived to evolve, one floor at a time, as part of an ongoing process, yet ready to incorporate new contributions from other artists or institutions. Its dynamic and evolving nature reflects Fondazione Prada’s desire to actively investigate how an exhibition space can be programmed and the role of a permanent project in a campus dedicated to contemporary culture.
In his works, Alex Da Corte (Camden, New Jersey, 1980) explores contemporary life through a range of different media including video, performance, installation, painting, and sculpture. Focusing on color and form, he combines high- and low-brow American cultural references —from branded items found in domestic life to figures from popular culture—to explore and interrogate personal and social politics, alienation, and the psychological dimensions of human experience. A site-specific video intervention titled Rubber Pencil Devil (2018) by the artist was presented at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai in 2020.
Housepainter II (2025) engages with themes central to Da Corte’s practice: the construction and transformation of identity, the relationship with everyday objects, and the self-portrait. In this installation, the artist literally steps into the shoes of a character deeply embedded in popular culture—the Pink Panther—appearing as a housepainter with an intent to cover the exhibition space walls with a roller, bucket, and protective sheet.
Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear), created in 2022 for the survey exhibition “Mr. Remember” at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebk, Denmark, is a clear homage to Mouse Museum by Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, 1929 – New York, 2022), in which the artist turned his collection of mass-produced objects into a permanent museum. Da Corte gives his version an ironic, macabre twist. He retains the layout of the original structure—in which Mickey Mouse’s head merges with the outline of a film camera—but cuts off one “ear,” hinting at the sadly famous episode of Vincent van Gogh’s life. Inside, a long vitrine presents hundreds of pop-culture objects from Da Corte’s personal collection, through which he composes a self-portrait. Preserved, displayed, and placed in relation to one another, these objects trace a constellation of his desires and memories.
In both works, the artists’ identity emerges in different ways. In Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) the installation becomes an extension of his memory, and the objects form a kind of portrait through accumulation. In Housepainter II self-representation unfolds through action and physical presence: the Pink Panther serves as an avatar, while painting progressively transforms the space.
As Da Corte explains: “Formally speaking, Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) and Housepainter II are two propositions about containment and our attempts to understand and shape the world. The Mouse Museum is a mausoleum, a repository of things found and made, tightened and resolved into internal reverie. In this austere space, the finest qualities and smallest differences are amplified. Housepainter II, on the other hand, is invested in spread, changing the environment by moving ever outward. Pausing in the middle of epic labor, the housepainter wonders how much work is ahead of him, how much his big actions can color a boundless landscape.”
These exaggerated and deliberately humorous forms of intervention—drawing freely on the codes of popular culture, from Van Gogh’s severed ear to the Pink Panther—also challenge how museums traditionally display artworks, while offering contrasting ways of occupying and transforming the exhibition space. The first is an enclosed, introspective structure in which objects are gathered and preserved; the second opens outward, spreading into the space through color and gesture. As Da Corte states: “The black, light-eating rooted monolith inviting viewers inside a brain, perhaps their brain; and a field of sun-suffused pink, highlighting the world outside of us.”
