Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua is transforming. This is happening from September 10, 2026 to April 5, 2027. Sonnabend Collection Mantova opens a new chapter of its cultural program. The timing coincides with the city’s thirtieth Festivaletteratura literary festival. Gilbert & George take center stage. However, the collection is also changing across its own permanent displays.
Foto: Shunk-Kender. © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
Who Was Ileana Sonnabend
The museum carries the name of a woman who was, in fact, among the most influential figures in the twentieth-century art world. Ileana Sonnabend was born in 1914 in Bucharest as Ileana Schapira, into a wealthy Romanian family. In the 1930s, she married Leo Castelli. He later became, in his own right, one of the most influential gallerists in New York. Together, they fled the war, first to Paris, then eventually to New York.
In 1962, she opened her own gallery in Paris. There, she became the first to bring American Pop art to Europe, meaning the work of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and their contemporaries, art that Europe barely knew at the time. Then, in 1971, she opened a gallery in New York as well. This time, however, her passion turned in the opposite direction.
She brought Arte Povera over from Italy, and she also supported conceptual, minimalist, and performance-based art, work that was, at the time, nearly impossible to sell commercially. She died in 2007 at the age of ninety-three, closing out a career spanning half a century, during which she shaped the direction of postwar art on both sides of the Atlantic.
A Collection as a Living Organism
Ileana Sonnabend never saw her collection as a closed archive. Instead, she understood it as an organism, one that changes over time and, moreover, offers fresh perspectives on its artists. Mantua now embodies this very philosophy. Alongside the Gilbert & George focus exhibition, therefore, the permanent display itself is being refreshed, with new works arriving from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jeff Koons.
Gilbert & George: Nearly Sixty Years on the Margins of Society
The relationship between Gilbert & George and the Sonnabend Gallery dates back to 1971. That year, their performance The Singing Sculpture inaugurated the gallery’s New York venue. Nearly twenty years have since passed since their last major solo show in Italy, so Mantua now presents eight works never shown here before.
Curator Mario Codognato explains how the duo understood the figure of the artist: an outsider who, by inhabiting the margins of society, gains a privileged view of its drama and mystery. Accordingly, the exhibition opens with the monumental charcoal drawings from The Bar II (1972), a quiet, melancholy space that Codognato calls a true prototype of the artists’ later work.
From the 1980s onward, meanwhile, the focus shifts toward their famous large-scale pictures arranged in vibrant geometric grids. Among the works on view, for instance, is Piss off! (2014), a forceful act of visual rebellion against social convention. Bale (2013), similarly, captures heightened urban anxiety, while the ironic imagery of Beardway (2016) shows the duo concealing their own likenesses behind the contemporary obsession with beards, turning themselves into pop icons.
A Medieval Cathedral, in a Contemporary Language
Perhaps the most interesting moment of the whole project lies in a single comparison, one that links seemingly distant eras. Codognato compares the grid pictures to a great medieval fresco, or alternatively, to a Gothic cathedral’s stained-glass window, a kaleidoscope of visual stimuli that invites viewers to measure their own existential flow against the work.
A similar gesture, moreover, appears in the parallel rotation of the permanent collection. Koons’s Buster Keaton (1988), for example, renders the film legend through woodcarving, a technique historically tied to medieval religious sculpture. Alongside it comes Jim Beam – Barrel Car (1986), whose steel surface evokes an almost sacred purity tied to industrial civilization. Together, both pieces replace the previously displayed Wild Boy and Puppy (1988) and Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014).
Warhol and Lichtenstein Return to Paper
The rotation also includes a shift in the Warhol and Lichtenstein holdings. The current Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can (Turkey Noodle), along with Lichtenstein’s Large Spool, is temporarily leaving the galleries. In their place, however, come three of Lichtenstein’s early works on paper from the early 1960s: Airplane (1961), Man with Coat (1961), and the comic-style Knock Knock (1961), alongside four Warhol canvases from his Flowers series (1964). As a result, visitors get a rare chance to trace how these iconic images actually came into being.
Practical Information
Sonnabend Collection Mantova is located at Palazzo della Ragione, Piazza Erbe 18, Mantua. The Gilbert & George exhibition runs through April 5, 2027.
