Rothko in Florence
Florence, Palazzo Strozzi
March 14 – August 23, 2026

From 14 March to 23 August 2026, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents one of the most significant exhibitions ever devoted in Italy to Mark Rothko, the undisputed master of American modern art. Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, Rothko in Florence is a unique project, conceived and produced specifically for Palazzo Strozzi to celebrate the artist’s special relationship with the city.

The architecture of the palazzo and Florence itself become an ideal setting in which to explore how Rothko translated the tension between classical measure and expressive freedom into painting, generating through colour a renewed perception of space that transcends the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Organised chronologically, the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi retraces Rothko’s entire career: from the 1930s and 1940s, marked by figurative works in dialogue with Expressionism and Surrealism, to the 1950s and 1960s, defined by his celebrated classic paintings composed of vast fields of colour capable of profoundly engaging the viewer through a language imbued with spirituality and poetry.

The exhibition features works from major international museums and prestigious private collections,
including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate in London, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition brings together over 70 works, many of which have never before been shown in Italy. Its various sections illuminate the different moments of Rothko’s career, also documenting his deep engagement with the Italian artistic tradition. His early works reveal an interest in symbolic and psychological approaches to the figure and in Renaissance spatial construction, as seen in Interior (1936), whose composition echoes Michelangelo’s tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici in the Sagrestia Nuova of San Lorenzo.

The exhibition highlights the artist’s dialogue with architecture through studies for the Seagram and Harvard Murals, with chromatic portals and closed thresholds also inspired by the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Towards the end, the exhibition unfolds with the Black on Gray works (1969–70) and his late works on paper, where sienna, pink and light-blue tones attain a synthesis of introspection and rigour. From Palazzo Strozzi, the project extends into the city through two special satellite interventions at locations particularly significant to the artist: the Museo di San Marco, where a selection of works will be presented in dialogue with the frescoes of Fra Angelico, and the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana designed by Michelangelo.

Rothko’s first encounter with Florence dates to 1950, during a trip to Italy with his wife Mell. He was deeply moved by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco and by Michelangelo’s architectural vision in the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which would inspire the Seagram Murals painted in the late 1950s, a dialogue that Rothko further developed during his second visit to Florence in 1966. In some of his more delicate works, one can also perceive the influence of fifteenth-century Italian art and, in particular, of Angelico’s fresco technique. Rothko and Angelico shared a desire to evoke a sense of transcendence, a dimension at once distant and profoundly familiar. While Angelico achieved this through the emotional resonance of divine figures in dialogue with earthly reality, Rothko created colour fields capable of accompanying viewers into different emotional depths, challenging accepted notions of abstraction and colour theory.

more. www.palazzostrozzi.org