Name: 18th Quadriennale d'arte — Fantastica
Start: 2025-10-11
End: 2026-01-18
Location: Palazzo delle Esposizioni

The Quadriennale di Roma

Italy's national quadrennial of contemporary art — founded in 1927 by Cipriano Efisio Oppo by resolution of the Governorate of Rome, with the first exhibition opening at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 1931. The institution has continued under the Italian Republic as a Foundation participated in by the Ministry of Culture, with its head office at Villa Carpegna and its principal exhibitions at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. The 18th edition, Fantastica, runs at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni from 11 October 2025 to 18 January 2026.

Established1927 — 202518 Quadriennali d'arte

Five curators on Fantastica

The 18th Quadriennale d'arte, Fantastica, opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on 11 October 2025 and runs to 18 January 2026 under the curatorial team of Luca Massimo Barbero, Francesco Bonami, Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, Francesco Stocchi and Alessandra Troncone, with a historical section curated by Walter Guadagnini in collaboration with the Quadriennale Library Archive. Fifty-four living Italian artists, born between the 1960s and the late 1990s — sixteen of them under thirty-five — are presented across five curatorial paths.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Quadriennale di Roma is the Italian national institution charged with the periodic survey of contemporary Italian art. It was founded in 1927 by Cipriano Efisio Oppo — artist, writer, member of Parliament and director of the artists' trade union under the Fascist regime — by resolution of the Governorate of Rome, as part of a broader institutional reorganisation of Italian exhibitions intended to give the country, alongside the Venice Biennale (founded 1895) and the Milan Triennale (founded 1923), a third structuring exhibition: a national quadrennial dedicated specifically to Italian art. The first Quadriennale opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Via Nazionale in January 1931 under Oppo's direction as general secretary, and the second followed in 1935. In 1937 the institution was established as an autonomous body in its own right.

The 18th Quadriennale d'arte, Fantastica, opened on 11 October 2025 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and runs to 18 January 2026. The edition is structured around five curatorial paths developed independently by five curators — Luca Massimo Barbero, Francesco Bonami, Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, Francesco Stocchi and Alessandra Troncone — together with a historical section curated by Walter Guadagnini drawing on the Quadriennale's Library Archive. The exhibition presents fifty-four living Italian artists born between the 1960s and the late 1990s — sixteen of them under thirty-five — with one hundred and eighty-seven works installed across approximately 2,000 square metres of the Palazzo's ground floor, including a significant body of site-specific productions. Forty-five of the artists are participating in the Quadriennale for the first time.

A national format, retooled across five curatorial points of view

The structural argument of Fantastica is that the most consequential reading of the first twenty-five years of twenty-first-century Italian art is not a single curatorial position but a federated one. Each of the five curators developed an independent path: Barbero on self-portraiture; Bonami on freedom and independence; Stocchi on the centrality of the artist; Mazzonis di Pralafera on photography as a language of revelation; and Troncone's incomplete body on human and non-human forms as evolving narrative fields. Guadagnini's historical section draws on the Quadriennale's archive to read the contemporary work against the institution's own ninety-eight-year record. The exhibition's title — Fantastica, in tribute to art's capacity to open new horizons — is the editorial through-line.

The institutional argument behind the federated format is the Quadriennale's continuing position as the only national-scale Italian exhibition wholly given over to contemporary Italian art. The Venice Biennale is international and curated to an international visitor; the Milan Triennale is design and architecture; the Quadriennale is the format in which Italian art is the subject. Across the post-war period the institution sustained that position under a sequence of state and municipal arrangements, and from 2005 onward as a Foundation jointly supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Rome, with its head office relocated to the seventeenth-century Villa Carpegna in the Aurelio district.

The immediate institutional precedent is the 17th Quadriennale, FUORI, which opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on 30 October 2020 — programmed under pandemic conditions — and ran through July 2021, after several extensions. FUORI was curated by Sarah Cosulich, then artistic director of the Foundation, and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, and was the result of more than two years of studio visits, portfolio reviews and archival work. The edition presented forty-three artists — more than half of them under forty, with a significant female presence — and built unexpected intergenerational bridges between Italian art of the 1960s and the present, structured around the three thematic lines of the palace, desire and the incommensurable. The 2020 edition is widely understood to have rewritten the Quadriennale's curatorial premise away from a survey of recent practice and toward a properly curated exhibition.

A Fascist-era format, continued by the Republic

The Quadriennale di Roma was founded in 1927 as an instrument of Fascist cultural policy — Oppo's institutional vision was that the national quadrennial would become the most important art competition in Italy. The institution survived the political rupture of 1945 and continues, under the Italian Republic, as one of the most institutionally interesting national-art platforms in Europe. The continuity is the editorial question.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Quadriennale di Roma is a difficult institution to read against the international biennial circuit because its founding moment is bound up with the Fascist regime's organisation of Italian cultural production. Cipriano Efisio Oppo was, in 1927, simultaneously an exhibiting artist, a Member of Parliament, and the director of the artists' trade union — and the institutional reorganisation by which he founded the Quadriennale was part of a broader programme by which the regime sought to rationalise Italian exhibitions and to direct artistic production toward the institutional ends of the state. The first two editions, in 1931 and 1935, opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni with substantial state purchasing campaigns intended to give Italian artists material incentives to participate. The institutional argument was that there should be a national exhibition of Italian art on the model that Venice already provided for international art.

The continuing question that the Quadriennale poses, at quadrennial scale, is whether a format founded in that institutional context can continue to do useful editorial work under a substantially different political settlement. The institutional record suggests that it can: the V Quadriennale opened in March 1948, after the war, in changed political and curatorial conditions and under a more generic title — the Rassegna Nazionale d'Arti Figurative — and the institution then ran a sequence of editions under historian and critic Fortunato Bellonzi, who served as general secretary from 1950 for more than three decades. Across the post-war period the Quadriennale documented the emergence of post-war Italian abstraction, Lucio Fontana's Spatialism, Alberto Burri's material practice and the eventual emergence of Arte Povera. The 1972 edition under Giulio Carlo Argan's intellectual influence and the further editions through the 1980s and 1990s extended that documentary function across the Republic's first half-century.

The contemporary institutional argument, made explicit under the 2020 and 2025 editions, is that the national-quadrennial format is the appropriate scale at which to make a continuing curatorial argument about Italian art. The Whitney Biennial, founded in 1932 in New York, is the closest American structural comparison: a national-scale exhibition that takes one country's contemporary art as its subject, on a biennial rhythm, with each edition under different curatorial leadership. The Whitney's institutional vulnerability over the past decade — repeated controversies over board composition, sponsor pressure and the politics of curatorial selection — is the contrast against which the Quadriennale's continuing institutional support from the Italian Ministry of Culture is the more stable arrangement. The institutional question that remains is whether the four-year rhythm, against the dominant biennial cadence of the international circuit, is structural advantage or institutional disadvantage.

The Quadriennale's editorial answer, made implicit through the choice of five independent curatorial paths for Fantastica in 2025, is that the four-year interval is what allows the institution to programme at the scale of an entire national-art reading rather than at the scale of a single curatorial argument. The Venice Biennale's biennial rhythm produces a continuous international conversation; the Quadriennale's four-year rhythm produces, instead, a continuing institutional record of the state of Italian art at quadrennial intervals. The post-2020 editions under Cosulich and Collicelli Cagol, and under the 2025 five-curator team, are the institution's working demonstration that the format is editorially live. The next decade of programming will continue to address whether the quadrennial format can continue to attract international curatorial and critical attention against the structural pull of the biennial circuit.

1931I Quadriennale

Oppo's first Quadriennale

The first Quadriennale d'arte nazionale opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Via Nazionale in January 1931 under the direction of Cipriano Efisio Oppo, who served as general secretary across the first four editions. The institution had been founded in 1927 by resolution of the Governorate of Rome, as part of an institutional reorganisation under the Fascist regime that sought to provide a national counterpart to the Venice Biennale. The 1931 and 1935 editions opened with substantial state purchasing campaigns; in 1937 the Quadriennale was established as an autonomous body in its own right.

Sources: Wikipedia; Quadriennale — Origins

1948V Quadriennale

The post-war re-opening

The V Quadriennale opened in March 1948 after the war, in changed political conditions and under a more generic title — the Rassegna Nazionale d'Arti Figurative, held at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna. The 1948 edition is widely read as the institution's reconnection with the international currents from which the Fascist period had largely isolated Italian artists. In 1950 the historian and critic Fortunato Bellonzi was appointed general secretary and went on to direct the institution for more than three decades.

Sources: Wikipedia; Quadriennale — Exhibitions

2005Foundation

From state body to Foundation

The Quadriennale was reconstituted as a Foundation — the Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma — jointly participated in by the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Rome. The institution's head office is at Villa Carpegna in the Aurelio district, a seventeenth-century complex built for Cardinal Gaspare di Carpegna (Vicar of Rome 1671–1714) and purchased by the Municipality of Rome in 1978. The Casino Nobile houses the head office and rooms for public initiatives; the nineteenth-century farmhouse on the grounds houses the Library Archive.

Sources: Quadriennale — Villa Carpegna; Quadriennale — About

2020XVII

Cosulich and Collicelli Cagol's FUORI

The 17th Quadriennale d'arte, FUORI, opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on 30 October 2020 under the curatorship of Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol. Programmed under pandemic conditions, the edition presented forty-three artists — more than half under forty, with a significant female presence — across an intergenerational reinterpretation of Italian art from the 1960s to the present, structured around the three thematic lines of the palace, desire and the incommensurable. The exhibition was the result of more than two years of studio visits, portfolio reviews and archival research, and rewrote the Quadriennale's curatorial premise toward a properly curated exhibition.

Sources: quadriennale2020.com; Italian Ministry of Culture

2025XVIII · current

The five-curator Fantastica

The 18th Quadriennale d'arte, Fantastica, opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on 11 October 2025 and runs to 18 January 2026 under five curators — Luca Massimo Barbero, Francesco Bonami, Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, Francesco Stocchi and Alessandra Troncone — each developing an independent curatorial path, with a historical section curated by Walter Guadagnini drawing on the Quadriennale Library Archive. Fifty-four living Italian artists born between the 1960s and the late 1990s — sixteen under thirty-five and forty-five participating in the Quadriennale for the first time — present one hundred and eighty-seven works across approximately 2,000 square metres of the Palazzo's ground floor.

Sources: Palazzo delle Esposizioni; Romeing, October 2025

The Quadriennale di Roma

Five curators on Fantastica

A national format, retooled across five curatorial points of view

A Fascist-era format, continued by the Republic

Defining moments

Oppo's first Quadriennale

The post-war re-opening

From state body to Foundation

Cosulich and Collicelli Cagol's FUORI

The five-curator Fantastica

The figures behind Rome's national format

Cipriano Efisio Oppo

Fortunato Bellonzi

Sarah Cosulich

Stefano Collicelli Cagol

Francesco Bonami

Luca Massimo Barbero

The Quadriennale across two Roman venues

Principal venues

Related national-scale contemporary art platforms

For further work

XIV Quadriennale di Roma — Retrospettive 1931/1948

XVII Quadriennale d'arte — FUORI

XVIII Quadriennale d'arte — Fantastica

La Quadriennale di Roma — institutional history

From the news desk

Institutional record

Critical context