From October 9 to November 30, 2025, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine present Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible, an exhibition conceived and produced by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini.

 

Open to the public free of charge, the exhibition follows the path and success of major projects organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in collaboration with other Milanese institutions—projects that have marked the cultural life of the city over the past twenty years: The Great Mother (Palazzo Reale [2015], promoted by the City of Milan | Culture) and The Restless Earth (Triennale di Milano [2017], in collaboration with Fondazione Triennale di Milano).

 

Now a museum dedicated to the historical memory of the city of Milan, Palazzo Morando was once the residence of Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini (1876–1945), a prominent figure in Milanese society at the turn of the twentieth century. A woman of great culture and philanthropy, the Countess assembled an extraordinary library devoted to disciplines then considered eccentric and marginal—alchemy, Theosophy, spiritualism, esotericism, and occult sciences—now preserved at the Archivio Storico Civico and Biblioteca Trivulziana. A generous patron and benefactor, yet passionately curious about forbidden knowledge, she even obtained a dispensation from the Milanese Archbishop to continue her studies. Her home became a salon where artists, intellectuals, and seekers gathered to explore the frontiers of mystical and esoteric thought. Rooted in the dual nature of the Countess—at once aristocratic and philanthropic, mystical and esoteric—Palazzo Morando becomes not merely an exhibition venue but also the very conceptual heart of Fata Morgana: a place where the Countess’s legacy reverberates through the artistic quests that, from the nineteenth century to today, have dared to explore the hidden territories of the unseen.

 

The title of the project evokes the legendary figure of Fata Morgana, the mythical enchantress of the Arthurian cycle, guardian of secrets and illusions, often associated with mysterious places such as Avalon—the liminal island between the world of the living and the dead. In the collective imagination, she is a powerful, ambivalent figure: at once benevolent and merciless, a keeper of enchantments, spells, and deceptions, but also, in more recent interpretations, a symbol of freedom and defiance—a woman who lives by her own rules, unbound by the constraints of society.

 

The exhibition also draws inspiration from the poem Fata Morgana, composed by André Breton in 1940 in Marseille while fleeing Nazi-occupied France. In those visionary pages—between sudden apparitions and enigmatic oracles—Breton conjured a realm where the visible and the invisible merge, where dream and reality intertwine until their boundaries dissolve. It is from this imagery, suspended between enchantment and revelation, that Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible takes shape, conceived as a museum within a museum, unfolding through the evocative rooms of Palazzo Morando as a journey between the known and the unknown.

 

Through more than two hundred works (286)—including paintings, photographs, films, documents, drawings, sculptures, and ritual objects—the exhibition brings together a constellation of seventy-eight figures: mediums, mystics, visionaries, and contemporary artists who have dared to open thresholds between the tangible world and unseen dimensions. The exhibition explores the fertile intersections between visual art and mysticism, paranormal phenomena, spiritualism, esotericism, Theosophy, and symbolic practices, revealing how inquiries once deemed eccentric or marginal have possessed the power to upend established conventions and reimagine art’s place in the world.

 

From these encounters unfolds an atlas of the invisible—an imaginative map populated by ecstasies, apparitions, and trance-born visions that reveal the creative power of experiences capable of reshaping the very boundaries of art. Far from seeking to prove the existence of the supernatural, Fata Morgana instead reflects on how, from the nineteenth century to the present, these practices have mirrored collective anxieties and desires, questioning the fragile balance between knowledge and mystery, faith and science, memory and imagination.

 

At the heart of the exhibition lies a rare and precious corpus—presented for the first time in Italy—of sixteen paintings by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Guided by mediumistic experiences and séances, af Klint embarked in 1906 on a radically innovative path. Long before the experiments of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, she gave form to an abstract and symbolic visual language entirely her own. Hidden from the public for decades in accordance with the artist’s wishes, af Klint’s works now stand as one of the most enigmatic and revolutionary chapters in the history of modern art: testimonies of a practice conceived as a visual transcription of otherworldly messages, of invisible and immaterial forces. Within them, cosmic geometries intertwine with organic motifs, astral visions with spiritual symbols, giving life to a pictorial cosmology that anticipated the great revolutions of twentieth-century art—which have only recently received full international recognition.

 

Af Klint’s paintings serve as a fulcrum and catalyst for a dialogue extending to other historical figures who, in different times and contexts, ventured into similar territories. Among them, Georgiana Houghton, who, as early as 1871, exhibited in London her abstract watercolors painted under the guidance of spirit beings, defying the Victorian public with images that found no precedent in the art of her time. Or Annie Besant, theosophist and activist, who, together with Charles Leadbeater, developed the concept of “thought-forms”—visual diagrams of mental energies that profoundly influenced artists and intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Also on view are the works of Emma Kunz, the visionary Swiss healer who created large geometric diagrams as therapeutic tools for diagnosing and curing illness; and the photographs of Eusapia Palladino, the famous Neapolitan medium whose séances captivated late-nineteenth-century Europe and drew the attention of scientists and scholars such as Cesare Lombroso and Pierre and Marie Curie. The exhibition then encounters the monumental paintings of Augustin Lesage and the imaginary architectures of Fleury-Joseph Crépin—self-taught artists of humble origins who claimed to be guided by spirit voices that helped them create rigorously symmetrical canvases populated by fantastic structures and sacred symbols, as if each painting were a temple or cathedral built at the command of the beyond.

 

These pioneering voices—long relegated to the margins of art history—resonate in dialogue with a constellation of modern and contemporary artists who have explored the same tensions through radically different languages. The experimental films of Maya Deren, with their dreamlike, hypnotic atmospheres, and of Kenneth Anger, with their esoteric, ritual overtones, open the path to cinema as a visionary medium. The photographs of Man Ray and Lee Miller, central figures of Surrealism, conjure an ambiguous, unsettling imagery, suspended between desire, the unconscious, and spirituality.

 

Alongside them, the irreverent, carnal visions of Carol Rama, the intimate wooden architectures of Louise Nevelson, and the ironic, militant performances of Chiara Fumai, who evoked and reanimated female mediums of the past, all overturn traditional gazes on history and femininity. Finally, many contemporary artists—Judy Chicago, with her feminist abstraction; Kerstin Brätsch, who reinterprets esoteric traditions through monumental, gestural paintings; Marianna Simnett, who explores the thresholds of trance and ecstatic embodiment; Andra Ursuţa, whose spectral images and photosensitive apparitions question the presence of the supernatural; and Diego Marcon, Giulia Andreani, and Guglielmo Castelli—expand the conversation with new forms and narratives, demonstrating how the fascination with the invisible continues to play a central role in contemporary artistic practice.

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Fondazione Trussardi.