An irreverent genius, a light-hearted anarchist, a pataphysical artist: from 8th of October 2024 to 9th of February 2025, Palazzo Reale pays homage to the multifaceted figure of Enrico Baj with a personal exhibition.

Milan celebrates Enrico Baj (Milan, October 31, 1924 – Vergiate, June 16, 2003), one of the masters of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with a large retrospective as one of the highlights of the autumn exhibitions, designed to revisit all the themes and subjects of his long and multifaceted career. Baj returns to Palazzo Reale in the Sala delle Cariatidi, exactly one hundred years after his birth and twelve years after the exhibition of The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli in the same room, which will be integrated for the first time into an anthological journey and in close dialogue with other works by the master.

The project, curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj, features nearly fifty works spanning a time period from the early 1950s to the dawn of the 2000s, covering the artist’s phases of research and engagement with various movements over time. His characters, which have entered popular imagination, such as Dames and Generals, Ultrabodies, Mirrors, Furniture, and the monsters of the Apocalypse, will enliven a carousel of creatures born from the surrealist and sci-fi universe of an artist who used irony and the grotesque as a tool to dismantle bourgeois conformity and take a stand against all forms of established power.

While awaiting the major retrospective at Palazzo Reale, the Museum of Natural History on Corso Venezia also hosted a tribute from July 16 to September 13, 2024, dedicated to engravings and artist books in which Enrico Baj humorously and imaginatively classified the natural world. Titled Enrico Baj: Fantastic Zoology and Other Natures, the exhibit showcased 22 plates from the Manual of Fantastic Zoology, Paradise Lost, the portfolio The Flowers (featuring his visionary botany), as well as the etchings from the famous 1958 De Rerum Natura, a (reimagined) homage to the Latin poem by Lucretius.

Curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj.