MILAN.- Gian Maria Tosatti’s new project is being presented at ex-Magazzini Raccordati beneath Milan Central Railway Station, where the environmental installation Paradiso transforms the space. Simultaneously the exhibition Es brent! (Brucia!) opened at Lia Rumma Gallery.
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Gian Maria Tosatti returns to Milan, two years after the solo show at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, with a visionary intervention on the complex present, organized in two exhibitions that are reflected in each other. Paradiso is a site-specific installation with a highly symbolic approach, designed especially for the ex Magazzini Raccordati in Milan Central Railway Station - buildings subject to the heritage regulations of the Sovrintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio - and produced by Eco Contract + Eco Design and Brembo, under the patronage of the Milan City Council (Comune di Milano). Es brent! in turn, marks the first exhibition by the artist to be held at Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan and features paintings and installations made between 2023 and 2025.
“Gian Maria Tosatti’s project represents an important opportunity for Milan to reflect on the present through art. Through his work, the artist confronts us with a powerful and disenchanted vision of our age, inviting us to question our role in contemporary society. We wholeheartedly support this initiative, which not only enhances a historic area of the city, but also underscores the value of art as a tool for awareness and memory. - said Tommaso Sacchi, the City of Milan’s Councillor for Culture. “A project that, thanks to the collaboration between institutions, companies and students, testifies to how culture can be an engine of urban regeneration and dialogue between past, present and future.”
Paradiso is an installation devised and planned as a harrowing, dystopian image of a sky set in this historic present, in which every ideal perspective appears to have collapsed. It is a monumental environmental work which unfolds in a space of 3,000 square meters, as a direct attack on the reality and times in which we live. The visitor is presented with a depleted paradise reduced to its skeletal remains, ravaged by time or by something that has slowly consumed it. The seven vaults of heaven have half collapsed due to leaking water, patched up with insulating materials. The seven large rooms where the hierarchy of angels reside are empty, inhabited by tramps wrapped in their mylar blankets. As one walks through the exhibition, amid filthy latrines and puddles beside mounds of snow, one has the sinister sensation that everything we see is the result of an act of violence. A marble wall, on which all the names of the angels are engraved, is broken into fragments. In the last room, behind a large iron portal, an underground track evokes an indelible image in collective memory: the railway tracks that vanish into the night and lead to the concentration camps.
The exhibition Es brent! at Galleria Lia Rumma takes this metaphorical horizon into a more intimate, earthly dimension. The title, taken from a Yiddish song of 1938, involves the visitor directly in a prophecy. “Our city is burning”, reads the text, “and you watch with your arms folded”. Outside the gallery, six large transparent banners dominate, hanging from high masts. The works made in 2025, which form part of the cycle “Fondamenta”, allude to the invisibility and unrecognizable nature of the powers that have governed the world since 1945 to the present. In the entrance hall, a large modern neon sign, mounted on a typical advertising structure, conveys the ambiguous relationship between the dreams of society and their consequences. On the first floor, several paintings from the series “Fireworks” are inspired by night-time footage of bombed cities and the launch of missiles. On the upper floor a new cycle of paintings leads us to the inner dimensions of our experience of time, while several installations reveal how reality is stratified, creating existential enigmas in our everyday lives.
As the artist himself states, “Paradiso is a piercing metaphor of a time in which human beings have slowly ascended the sky only to ravage, disown and empty it. It is an analogy of the gradual destruction of every ideal, even that of democracy, of the poisoning of the very concept of sacred in the society of indifference. Paradiso is a cruel, disenchanted vision of a world that no longer believes in itself, nor in an ideal horizon, and inhabits a dark, desolate land on which the sky has fallen in shattered fragments.”
Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980) is an Italian visual artist. His poetics involve large scale investigations into issues linked to the concept of identity, from the political or existential standpoint. The resulting work is permeated by a profound sense of history. He specializes mainly in large-scale site-specific installations designed for whole buildings or urban areas, often involving local communities in the creative process. From 2021 to 2024, he was the artistic director of the Rome Quadriennale. He is a lead writer for Corriere della Sera and Il Sole24Ore newspapers and works with several specialist magazines. He is the founder and editor of the institutional magazines La differenza and Quaderni d’arte italiana. His works have been exhibited in leading international museums and galleries such as the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca (Milan, 2023), the 59th Venice Biennale (Venice, 2022), the Hessel Museum of CCS BARD (New York, 2024), the Museo di Capodimonte (Naples, 2023), Museo MADRE (Naples, 2016), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, 2011), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome, 2017), Petah Tikva Museum of Art (Israel, 2017), Museo Archeologico di Salerno (2014), American Academy in Rome (2013), Museo Villa Croce (Genoa, 2012), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome, 2008), Chelsea Art Museum (New York, 2009), and BJCEM (2014).
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