GIORGIO GABURRO

THIRTY YEARS OF GALLERY

9 October 2025 – 10 January 2026
Galleria Gaburro, Milan

To mark its thirtieth anniversary, Galleria Gaburro presents a major group exhibition that transforms its Milan venue into a stage for dialogue, memory, and artistic exchange. More than a celebration, Thirty Years of the Gallery is a reflection on the evolving role of the gallery itself: a place where ideas are tested, relationships are forged, and artistic visions take shape.

Founded by Giorgio Gaburro in 1995 in the province of Vicenza, far from the traditional centres of the Italian art world, the gallery has built its identity through independence, intellectual curiosity, and a willingness to embrace risk. From its early years in Thiene to its subsequent venues in San Bonifacio and Verona, and finally to the opening of its Milan space in 2021, Galleria Gaburro has remained committed to fostering meaningful dialogue between artists, curators, and audiences. Today, Giorgio Gaburro leads the gallery together with his daughter Cecilia.

Curated by Matteo Scabeni, the exhibition unfolds as a theatrical narrative in three acts inspired by the structure of Greek tragedy. Revisiting the symbolic number of artists included in the gallery’s first exhibition in Verona, seven gallery artists were invited to select another artist with whom to establish a direct dialogue. The result is a series of seven encounters that bring together different generations, sensibilities, and artistic languages.

The exhibition features pairings between Liu Bolin and JR, Marco Cingolani and Andrea Mastrovito, Emilio Isgrò and Ferdinando Scianna, Iain Andrews and Leyla Cardenas, Jan Fabre and Marina Abramović, Daniel Spoerri and Ruben Montini, and Hermann Nitsch and Andrea Cusumano. Through these dialogues, the gallery becomes a living stage where works of art interact as voices within a shared narrative.

Rather than commemorating the past, Thirty Years of Gallery looks toward the future. It reflects on the gallery as a space of uncertainty, experimentation, and discovery, reaffirming the importance of sustaining artistic research in a cultural landscape defined by constant transformation.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a major publication edited by Matteo Scabeni, bringing together archival materials, historical documents, critical essays, exhibition records, and a dedicated section on the anniversary project. Conceived as an “emotional chronology,” the volume offers an intimate and multifaceted portrait of three decades of activity.

Artists

Marina Abramović
Iain Andrews
Liu Bolin
Leyla Cardenas
Marco Cingolani
Andrea Cusumano
Jan Fabre
Emilio Isgrò
JR
Andrea Mastrovito
Ruben Montini
Hermann Nitsch
Ferdinando Scianna
Daniel Spoerri

Curated by

Matteo Scabeni

Opening Reception

8 October 2025
6:30 PM – 9:00 PM

Exhibition

9 October 2025 – 10 January 2026

Venue

Galleria Gaburro
Via Cerva 25
Milan, Italy

Opening Hours

Tuesday–Saturday
10:00 AM–1:00 PM
2:00 PM–7:00 PM

A TRAGEDY IN THREE ACTS

Giorgio Gaburro. Thirty Years of Gallery

by Matteo Scabeni

To think of all the art galleries that once shaped their era and then suddenly disappeared can be a source of a certain nostalgia. The list of galleries that have died—fleeting temples of the ephemeral—would be long and complex indeed; a dizzying inventory through which one might discover the almost archaeological stratifications that have made art truly contemporary. What we are gathered here today to tell is a particular story: markedly independent and fundamentally different to what might be considered the conventional path of gallery-making.

In 1995, Giorgio Gaburro founded Boxart in Thiene, in the province of Vicenza. At the opening of the gallery’s first exhibition, works by Salvador Dalí, acquired by the two partners from an important private collection, turned out to be forgeries. The irony of this failed operation, viewed today, is not only profoundly revealing when considered alongside the deep sarcasm that has always accompanied the gallerist's character, but also genuinely emblematic if one remembers that Gaburro was born an entrepreneur in the construction industry, not a gallerist. Shortly thereafter, in 1998, the Gallery moved to San Bonifacio, before arriving in Verona in 2002. It was there, as Gaburro himself often remarks that things began to be taken seriously. The gallerist learned the profession through Emilio Mazzoli and enriched his roster through increasingly important collaborations. Finally, in 2021, he opened a second venue in Milan. From that moment onward, he was joined by his daughter, Cecilia Gaburro.

The exhibition that inaugurated the Verona programme was The Seven Deadly Sins. Seven artists were associated with the seven vices, not without a somewhat provocative spirit. The pairings unfolded almost as parodies: Marco Cingolani represented Pride, Mark Kostabi Greed, Federico Guida Lust, Alessandro Bazan Envy, Mario Schifano Gluttony, Gian Marco Montesano Wrath, and Innocente Sloth. Thirty years later, Gaburro’s virtuous attitude has evolved into a distinctive method: to run a gallery means to cultivate doubt.

Thus emerges Giorgio Gaburro. Thirty Years of Gallery. The exhibition consists of seven dialogues, echoing the number of artists featured in the first Verona exhibition. Each artist represented by the gallery was invited to select another artist with whom to establish a dialogue—whether direct or indirect, profound or intuitive. Their works become collective, often collaborative, orchestrated within a larger narrative. The exhibition path follows the structure of Greek tragedy, divided into three acts—Prologue, Scene, and Catharsis—forming a constant climax of tension and representation that mirrors the tragic curve. The reference point is Agatha Christie’s novel Three Act Tragedy, in which sustained dramatic tension is balanced by a ruthless and ambiguous use of irony. Each section contains both drama and play, lightness and anguish, laughter and suffering.

Iain Andrews and Leyla Cardenas, Liu Bolin and JR, Marco Cingolani and Andrea Mastrovito, Jan Fabre and Marina Abramović, Emilio Isgrò and Ferdinando Scianna, Hermann Nitsch and Andrea Cusumano, Daniel Spoerri and Ruben Montini inhabit the Gallery’s spaces, constructing a narrative that follows a precise trajectory while remaining open to stumbling points, obstacles, games, and secondary narratives of varying complexity. Indeed, each artwork opens—as in the tradition of tragedy—onto a constellation of smaller stories, including, in this case, the story of Galleria Gaburro itself.

First and foremost: the Prologue. In principio erat verbum. In the beginning was the Word.

Liu Bolin’s work is the outcome of a complex process. By incorporating multiple media—performance, photography, and painting—Liu disappears into the image, leaving behind a trace that dissolves into its surroundings; what remains visible is an act of mimicry. In his collaborative work with JR, this dynamic of imitation and appropriation becomes even more pronounced and carefully orchestrated. On that occasion, the French artist celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Ieoh Ming Pei’s Pyramid with an installation evoking an archaeological excavation, constructing a perspective on the ephemerality of memory, the instability of knowledge, and the ironic, poetic use of monumentality. Liu’s intervention consists in simulating that already artificial landscape devised by JR, creating a double fiction—an antinomy of representation.

Marco Cingolani’s painting transforms the canvas into a visual narrative existing beyond space and time. His pictorial language is rooted in an ancestral mark from which emerges a meditation on a distant, often unfathomable memory—contemplative and deeply ironic. It is an erudite imagery that inhabits the time of its own making: the infinite temporality within which works of art unknowingly mature into completeness, establishing a rhythmic cadence throughout the exhibition. By placing his work in direct dialogue with Andrea Mastrovito, this perspective on the artwork as the outcome of a continuous, cumulative process is further intensified—a profoundly arbitrary choice. Cingolani insists on a kind of proscenium, a musical narration of painting, while Mastrovito articulates the same artistic necessity: to reconstruct the intricate system of the space in which we are immersed.

Emilio Isgrò’s poetics are defined by erasure as a dramatic gesture intended to protect the word—to save it—from ideological abuse. On view is the lyricism of the Greek tradition: the parodos, the sung and recited chorus, which reveals the poetic matrix already embedded in his practice. His reflection traverses centuries of intellectual and cultural history to establish itself as an eternal narrative on the origin and nature of language. His dialogue with Ferdinando Scianna is grounded in the profound thread of memory: subtracting from sight, depriving the image of precise references in order to evoke a visceral, almost obscure sense of origin. For Scianna, photography possesses an evocative power that recalls the rituality of the body and the ancestral echo of popular traditions. Together, their works evoke an initiatory ritual, a profound katabasis into the present.

Spannung—the tension of the Struggle. The climax of dramatic tension, culminating in punishment—often death—before the stillness of resolution.

By traversing the unconscious, where our most inexpressible desires, aspirations, and hopes remain concealed, Iain Andrews investigates, through painting, the most visceral representation of trauma. His figures are protean characters unfolding within an openly theatrical staging, where confused, often indeterminate and indefinable landscapes alternate. His painting becomes the form of memory’s intricate pathways, where the very nature of the soul is sought within the deepest recesses of the self. These images are placed directly alongside the works of Leyla Cárdenas, in which memory is transformed into poetic abstraction. More analytically, the artist immerses herself in the boundless inner expanses of the cosmos to investigate our stratified and ephemeral condition—a structure that ultimately mirrors reality itself. By removing layers from the surface or creating strata of untitled canvases upon which she prints, she extracts a quiet delicacy, producing a profound meditation on pure essence: an unknown composition of reality’s mysterious skeleton.

Jan Fabre and Marina Abramović: the servant and the warrior of beauty. The apex of tragic tension. For Jan Fabre, the artist must reveal and lay bare the infinite drama of the relationship between the contingent and the transcendent, between the ideal and the tangible, between beauty and poetry. Fabre struggles in search of truth; he embraces the voracity of a starving heart—one suffering from deprivation—driven by the urgent desire to discover the laws governing reality and devour them. In the performance Virgin/Warrior, created with Marina Abramović at the Palais de Tokyo in 2004, the two artists engage in a physical and symbolic battle against the destruction of art. It is a dance in which Abramović and Fabre embody the eternity of the ephemeral; a declaration of love in which the boundaries of authorship dissolve until they reach death itself—the ultimate risk of art's disappearance, the emptiness of their efforts, annihilation; the consequence of the hubris of those who believe they can, through their own strength alone, rescue a condition irretrievably buried beneath the weight of the embarrassment of existing in the world. This same suggestion is borne witness to by the spectator observing the scene: a glass skull painted with Bic blue ink, supporting the skeleton of a bird—a metaphor for lost beauty.

After the drama comes an unsettling calm. Everything has been irrevocably altered, and yet the representation remains suspended: from pathos emerges an unstable stillness, poised somewhere between grief and indulgence.

In Daniel Spoerri's works, the scene is sealed and crystallized in an ephemeral instant, in the aftermath of a concluded struggle. What remains is merely a barren battlefield where only fragile remnants and traces are visible. In the case of the Faux Tableaux-Piège (False Snare Pictures), however, nothing has ever truly taken place. They constitute the explicit revelation of artifice: Spoerri collected tiny objects from flea markets in order to construct the occasion of a celebration—a children's birthday party without children.

Similarly, Ruben Montini's works, transfigured scenes rendered as polychrome textile compositions, emerge from a painful and complex intimacy. The bouquets themselves are conceived as gifts that their owners are invited to dedicate to all victims of homotransphobia, expressing a sensitivity born of suffering—a delicate symbol of a struggle that is powerful yet whispered. If Spoerri investigates obsessive everyday life and melancholy, Montini transforms them into an intimacy and a suffering that are shared—and therefore political—in precisely the same way.

Finally, Hermann Nitsch and Andrea Cusumano. Their works are the outcome of abreaction, of the process of purification leading to a renewed form of collective catharsis. The canvas becomes a relic upon which the traces of a pagan ritual—bloody and ferocious—remain impressed.

Hermann Nitsch conceived the entire creative process as a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—structured around a unified and systematic complexity of media. It is a visceral synesthetic narrative, born of a tragic legacy; of Adorno's "Song of the Sirens," according to which the work of art must awaken the spectator from the slumber of reason. It is, precisely, abreaction enacted through the body.

Andrea Cusumano is inextricably connected to the master, from whom he inherited the importance of moving nomadically across different media. By deconstructing the image in search of its underlying structure, the artist develops atmospheres suspended between the liturgical and the oracular, elaborating a system of signs that reveals a poetics in which the artwork must be experienced and lived. This same principle takes shape in the representation of a pair of indeterminate figures, hollowed out by their own suffering.

An ambitious project comes to its conclusion: a threshold, the celebration of a journey, the closing of the narrative arc of a story so singular and so delicate that it appears almost intimate and introspective, while simultaneously opening onto the infinite possibilities that will shape its future.

The richness and diversity of the soul—of the vision—of a gallery cannot be separated from the emotional bearing that accompanies an immense and passionate process of research. Ever-changing, ever-renewed associations succeed one another in an indeterminate cycle composed of irregular rhythms, fluctuating emotions, and deeply committed exhibitions that now define a history spanning just over thirty years.

The research undertaken by Galleria Gaburro, by Giorgio and Cecilia Gaburro, and by all those whose stories have passed through it—those who encountered one another and departed, those who remained—continues to assume new forms. These are the forms of passion and affection; methodologies concerned less with the deontology of things than with the beauty of art; the infinite variety of the cultural and emotional heritage shared by those who, like us, aspire not only to be-with, but also to become.

A simple yet profoundly demanding reference lies in Italo Calvino:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno we inhabit every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways of not suffering from it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and learning: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno; then make it endure, give it space.

And so, beyond the explanatory label, just as the artist must pursue the beauty of art's truth, the gallerist must seek out what is truly art, recognize it, and therefore ensure its endurance by giving it space.