History, digital, and the future in "Grande Brera": the art program transforming Milan

Milan is preparing to experience a new season of art with the “Grande Brera” project, a true cultural hub that brings together the Pinacoteca, Palazzo Citterio, and the Braidense National Library in a succession of prestigious events between late 2025 and the first half of 2026. The goal is clear: to connect ancient art, contemporaneity, and the languages of digital culture into a living network of research and cultural exchange. The new course, led by director Angelo Crespi, promises a rich program that spans eras, genres, and disciplines.

Among the most eagerly awaited novelties are collaborations with the National Museum of Digital Art, which will bring immersive installations and innovative projects to the city starting on September 18, when Palazzo Citterio will host on its LED wall Strata #1 by Quayola. This video work, acquired by MNAD, transforms the vault of the Church of the Gesù in Rome into abstract chromatic and geometric matter, opening a reflection on memory, between figuration and abstraction, in a dialogue between cultural heritage and new technologies that redefines the very concept of a museum.

The journey continues with Vanishing Trees by Debora Hirsch, from January 2026, an installation intertwining digital art, science, and memory, offering a site-specific narrative of the relationship between human beings and the environment, imagination and landscape. These initiatives also result from close collaboration between Brera and MNAD, confirming a deliberate will to merge tradition with the most advanced experimentation.

Also at Palazzo Citterio, starting October 16, the major retrospective dedicated to Bice Lazzari will take place, an artist who worked across genres and materials, from design to applied arts and to the minimalist outcomes of her later years. Curated by Renato Miracco, the exhibition features more than one hundred works, with loans from internationally renowned museums and collections such as the Guggenheim in New York and the GNAMC in Rome, offering a fascinating journey through the entire creative evolution of one of the most original figures in twentieth-century Italian painting.

From October 30 to January 18, 2026, the Stirling Room will host Giovanni Frangi’s monumental installation Nobu at Elba Redux, composed of four large canvases and twenty burned foam sculptures illuminated at regular intervals, designed to evoke nocturnal moods and solitary landscapes. Curated by Giovanni Agosti and installed by Francesco Librizzi, the project seeks to recall the emotional resonance of its original site of creation, Villa Panza in Varese, renewing for Milan an extraordinary opportunity for artistic engagement.

The year 2026 will also feature Giovanni Gastel, the celebrated photographer and avant-garde interpreter, with an exhibition retracing his career from fashion covers to iconic advertising campaigns. At Palazzo Citterio, visitors will encounter the artistic trajectory that shaped Italian and international visual style over recent decades, spanning fashion, society, and photographic introspection.

Not to be missed, the project Metafisica & Metafisiche—curated by Vincenzo Trione and spread across Palazzo Reale, the Museo del Novecento, and Brera—which also involves artist William Kentridge in a tribute to Giorgio Morandi, once again highlighting the value of Milan’s cultural network in the international resonance of contemporary art.

May and July will be the months of Mimmo Paladino’s monumental installation I Dormienti (The Sleepers), presented in a new exhibition project curated by Lorenzo Madaro. The Campanian artist returns to a Milanese public institution to set his celebrated sculptures in dialogue with space and today’s urban sensibility, offering visitors a unique and engaging experience.

The Pinacoteca di Brera, meanwhile, is preparing to host an unprecedented exhibition: from May 14 to August 30, 2026, it will be dedicated for the first time to Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, an enigmatic artist active between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Through a rigorous scientific framework, curators Maria Cristina Passoni and Cristina Quattrini will reconstruct the profile of an author who intersected Milanese and Venetian influences with names such as Bramantino, Leonardo, Bellini, Giorgione, and Dürer. This event promises to unveil previously unseen masterpieces from national and international loans, offering a unique stylistic map of Renaissance art.

At the Braidense National Library, October opens with the exhibition Costume Jewelry, dedicated to the extraordinary collection of non-precious jewelry of Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: a selection that traces the creative history of bijoux from the 1930s to the present, enriched by photographs and texts by leading international experts. This will be followed by the exhibition Edoarda Masi and China, curated in collaboration with the University of Milan, which highlights the legacy of the celebrated sinologist and Braidense librarian across literature, thought, and translation.

In the same hall, fifty years after the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini and one hundred years after the birth of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a new cultural dialogue will be held from January 29 to March 28, bringing together two irregular voices of the twentieth century, between critical reflections and poetic adventures. Closing the series, between April and June 2026, will be an exhibition dedicated to Umberto Eco—ten years after his death—renewing the relationship between art, literature, and thought within the monumental setting of the Braidense Library.

Grande Brera thus confirms its role as a nerve center of Milanese and Italian culture, capable of weaving connections between past, present, and future, involving internationally renowned artists, historical figures, and digital avant-gardes. The diverse and layered exhibition program invites visitors to rediscover iconic spaces such as the Pinacoteca and Palazzo Citterio, to enter places of memory and experimentation, and to be carried away by transversal paths that unite generations, visions, and disciplines.

The curatorial choices highlight how Brera’s mission is to create a platform open to innovation, to cross-pollination between genres and languages, without renouncing scientific rigor or the valorization of historical heritage. The intersection of digital and tradition, immersive installations and documentary research, marks a new phase for Milan, ready to welcome a cosmopolitan and curious audience, capable of experiencing art as both a social and personal dimension.