The Quadriennale once again takes stock of Italian artistic production, with a twofold gaze directed at both the present and the past.

Fantastica is art, in its ability to open new horizons, across all latitudes and in every era. Fantastica, in its verbal meaning, is an exhortation to rediscover today the power of symbolism and the force of imagination—even as our daily lives, undermined by the affirmation of models and lifestyles that have radically changed in the past twenty-five years, confront us with the urgency of an ever-changing present.
The theme of the exhibition is Italian art after the year 2000, on which five curators were invited to reflect through their own curatorial projects. Each of them, in their individuality and specificity, focuses on young and mid-career artists, most of them participating in the Quadriennale for the first time.
Their fields of inquiry concern the mechanisms of self-representation; the figure of the artist and the importance of affirming and maintaining one’s identity in relation to institutional commissioning; the state of images—never before so pervasive yet perhaps never so irrelevant; and the representation of the human, animal, and mechanical body, in an incompleteness that reveals new potential and openness to further developments.