NEW YORK, NY.- The New Museum presents the first New York museum solo exhibition of artist Diego Marcon (b. 1985, Busto Arsizio, Italy; lives and works in Lombardy, Italy), whose work in moving image and installation coopts familiar forms from horror movies, slapstick comedy, and cartoons to subvert cinematic archetypes and call into question accepted norms of family life and childhood. On view September 24, 2026, through January 31, 2027, Arrivederci, Piggies! stages four of Marcon’s most significant films as a total installation, including his newly commissioned film Krapfen. This film merges human choreography with green-screen CGI to explore the relationship between a child and their family, who are represented by floating articles of clothing. Krapfen—the word for a traditional Austrian jam doughnut, from which the work takes its name—is repeated relentlessly throughout the film’s soundtrack, threatening the main character through a joyful but sinister song. Combining elements of ballet, musicals, and classic animation, Krapfen is the first work to be created through the New Futures Production Fund, an annual collaboration between the New Museum and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Lafayette Anticipations, the Renaissance Society, and the Vega Foundation are co-commissioning partners.
Through meticulously staged films and animations, Diego Marcon crafts deeply ambiguous and morally bewildering stories that unearth the conditions under which humans perceive desires, memories, and one’s selves. While informed by the fantastical visions and narrative structures of fables replete with families and children, his artworks also meditate on existential melancholy and frequently manifest themselves in disquieting events. Dissolving the edges between the ordinary and the uncanny, Marcon’s films conjure deep-rooted dreams and nightmares while awakening childhood memories, both real and imagined, of tragedies, myths, and folktales. For his New Museum exhibition, Marcon will build on his practice of playing with space and spectatorship through a total installation in which the viewer is enveloped in all four films simultaneously.
Diego Marcon: Arrivederci, Piggies! is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Madeline Weisburg, Senior Assistant Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with contributions by Erika Balsom, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Philippa Snow, as well as an interview between the artist and Massimiliano Gioni.
