ROME.- A major exhibition devoted to Italian artist Elisa Montessori has opened at the Casino dei Principi at the Musei di Villa Torlonia, bringing together more than 100 works spanning painting, drawing, artist’s books, site-specific interventions and loans from public and private collections.
Titled Elisa Montessori. Nel corso del tempo (Elisa Montessori. Over the Course of Time), the exhibition runs through February 28, 2027, and surveys the long career of the Genoa-born artist, who has lived and worked in Rome for much of her life.
Rather than presenting a conventional chronological retrospective, the exhibition is conceived as something closer to an autobiographical journey. Montessori herself described the project as an attempt to look back across her own practice and understand what she has made over the course of decades.
“It truly is an exhibition over the course of time,” she said. “Without having been planned as a retrospective, it is the exhibition in which I myself try to understand what I have done.”
Curated by Alessandra Mamm and Federica Pirani, the show is organized into thematic sections that move through some of the recurring ideas in Montessori’s work, including metamorphosis, mythology, science, literature, Eastern philosophy and the natural world. The installation is designed to interact with the rooms of Villa Torlonia and its surrounding garden.
Among the works on view are oil paintings, drawings and artist’s books, as well as a new version of Dafne, created specifically for the exhibition and inspired by Montessori’s 1977 work of the same name.
Montessori’s career has been marked by a persistent willingness to move across techniques and materials. Over the years she has worked with ceramics, mosaics, oil paint, paper, pigments and installation, while drawing on interests ranging from poetry and literature to science and Asian art.
Her artistic formation began in Rome in the late 1940s. Although she did not attend an academy of fine arts, she studied at Sapienza University while working alongside artists including Corrado Cagli and the Basaldella brothers. She became particularly close to sculptor Mirko Basaldella, serving as his student and assistant.
In the late 1950s, after marrying Chinese scientist Mario Tchou, Montessori moved to Milan and became involved with the city’s cultural life. Following Tchou’s early death, she returned to Rome and entered a new phase of her work. While maintaining close contact with artists, writers, critics and architects, she remained independent of established movements and groups.
That independence became one of the defining features of her practice. Her work developed in dialogue with contemporary artistic research, but without settling into a single visual language. The exhibition emphasizes this sense of continual change, presenting Montessori’s art as a sustained investigation rather than a sequence of fixed stylistic periods.
Her work is represented in major Italian collections including the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Galleria Nazionale in Rome. She has also participated in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Quadriennale and the So Paulo Biennial.
In 2011, Montessori was named a Knight of the Italian Republic by President Giorgio Napolitano, and in 2017 she received the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei’s international Leonardo Paterna Baldizzi prize for painting.
The exhibition also includes several films and interviews documenting the artist and her working process, including Francesco Vaccaro’s 2004 documentary Elisa Montessori, a 2020 video interview presented by Monitor, and a 2025 interview produced in connection with a retrospective devoted to Titina Maselli.
A new scholarly catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale accompanies the exhibition. It includes a substantial biographical interview with Montessori, critical essays, bibliographical material and contributions examining subjects ranging from particle physics to Chinese culture and the role of signs and language in her work.
A public program will run alongside the exhibition, with workshops devoted to techniques used by Montessori, including monotype printing, mosaics and calligraphy, as well as lectures exploring themes such as Eastern philosophy and quantum physics.
Elisa Montessori. Nel corso del tempo is on view at the Casino dei Principi, Musei di Villa Torlonia, Rome, through February 28, 2027.
