MILAN.- Grande Brera is preparing for one of its most expansive seasons yet, bringing together painting, literature, digital art and institutional history in a 2026–27 program that stretches from the Romanticism of Francesco Hayez to the performance legacy of Marina Abramović.

Rather than functioning as a series of separate exhibitions, the season is designed to bring the various institutions that make up Grande Brera into closer conversation. The Pinacoteca di Brera, Palazzo Citterio, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense and Brera Academy of Fine Arts will each contribute exhibitions that move between historical collections and contemporary artistic practice.

Two anniversaries provide much of the framework: the 250th anniversary of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and the centenary of the Amici di Brera, the association whose acquisitions and donations have helped shape the museum’s holdings.

The season begins at the Braidense on October 2 with The Island of the Day Before. Books, Seas and Machines of Knowledge, marking ten years since the death of Umberto Eco. Rather than approaching Eco solely as a novelist, the exhibition will reconstruct the intellectual universe behind The Island of the Day Before, combining material from his rare-book collection with the Braidense’s holdings, digital reconstructions, preparatory material and historic navigational instruments.

At the Pinacoteca, One Hundred Years for Brera. Purchases and Gifts from the Friends opens October 6 and runs through January 10. Paintings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, documents and photographs will trace the century-long role played by the Amici di Brera in expanding and supporting the institution’s collections.

Three days later, Palazzo Citterio will open the first major posthumous retrospective devoted to Carlo Maria Mariani. Curated by Eike Schmidt and Clayton Calvert, the exhibition brings together around 70 paintings and large-scale cartoons spanning work from the 1940s to 2019. Mariani’s career moved through conceptual Neoclassicism, Hyperrealism, abstraction and metaphysical painting, making him a particularly fitting figure for a program built around the movement between historical languages and contemporary reinterpretation.





Brera’s own history moves to the foreground later in October with The Masters of Brera. Teaching Art. Opening October 30, the exhibition will consider generations of artists who also taught at the Academy, including Adolfo Wildt, Carlo Carr�, Arturo Martini, Achille Funi, Marino Marini, Gastone Novelli, Luciano Fabro, Grazia Varisco and Renata Boero. The exhibition looks at the Academy not simply as a place where art was taught, but as a laboratory in which Italian modernism and postwar experimentation repeatedly took shape.

That anniversary will also be marked at the Pinacoteca by an exhibition devoted to Francesco Hayez, opening in November. Hayez, one of the central figures of Italian Romanticism and an artist inseparable from Brera’s 19th-century identity, will be represented through works from both the Academy and the Pinacoteca. By reuniting the two collections, curators Valentina Ferrari and Fernando Mazzocca aim to recreate the original relationship between the institution where artists were trained and the museum in which their work came to be preserved.

Contemporary technology will enter the program through Palazzo Citterio’s monumental ledwall. Beginning November 24, Marina Abramović will present Marina Abramović Element, a series of digital performances in which the artist’s avatar—a digital twin—extends a practice historically centered on the physical presence and limits of the body into a virtual realm. The project was produced with the support of TAEX Gallery and is curated by Clelia Patella.

In early 2027, attention will shift toward Mario Schifano, whose exhibition at Palazzo Citterio will revisit both the paintings and the restless cultural environment that made him one of the defining figures of postwar Italian art. Works ranging from his celebrated 1960s monochromes to later experiments with media will occupy the second floor, while Sala Stirling will evoke the psychedelic atmosphere of the late 1960s and the cross-pollination of painting, music, poetry and underground cinema associated with Schifano’s celebrated happenings.

The Braidense, meanwhile, will turn toward contemporary art with Pathosformel, an immersive project by Michele Ciacciofera scheduled for January through March. Ciacciofera’s installations, paintings, sculptures and works on paper bring archaeology and anthropology into dialogue with questions of migration, identity, memory and the transmission of knowledge.

Digital art returns to the Palazzo Citterio ledwall between February and April with Davide Maria Coltro’s The Intelligence of Wonder. Developed from nearly three decades of research into what the artist calls the “Media Painting,” the work will turn the architectural screen itself into an evolving luminous painting rather than treating it simply as a surface for projected images.

The season will continue from May through September with an exhibition devoted to Sean Scully. Although born in Dublin and long associated with the United States, Scully has maintained an enduring relationship with Italy. The exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, will examine how Italian art—from Siena Cathedral and Piero della Francesca to Titian, Raphael and Giorgio Morandi—has resonated through his own work.

Literary history provides another conclusion to the season. Beginning May 6, 2027, Grande Brera and the Centro Nazionale Studi Manzoniani will mark two centuries since the 1827 publication of the first edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Spread between the Biblioteca Braidense and Casa Manzoni, the exhibition will bring together manuscripts, early editions, translations, pirated copies and illustrated versions to reconstruct the complex publication history of one of Italy’s foundational literary works.

Taken together, the program makes clear that Grande Brera is seeking to define itself as more than a museum complex. Its 2026–27 season treats the institution as a network in which historic collections, artistic education, literature and contemporary experimentation can overlap—allowing Hayez and Schifano, Eco and Abramović, manuscripts and digital avatars to inhabit the same cultural landscape.