Massimiliano Gioni
is the Artistic Director of the New Museum in New York and the Director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan. He has curated numerous international exhibitions and biennials worldwide including: the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, which he directed in 2013 (being the youngest artistic director of the Venice Biennale in its entire history); the 8th Gwangju Biennial, titled 10,000 Lives (2010); Of Mice and Men – the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (co-curated with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick); and Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain (co-curated with Marta Kuzma in 2004). In 2003, for the 50th edition of the Venice Biennial, Gioni curated The Zone, a temporary pavilion for young Italian art. At the New Museum, since 2008, Gioni has curated solo exhibitions by John Akomfrah, Pawel Althamer, Ed Atkins, Thomas Bayrle, Lynda Benglis, Jordan Casteel, Paul Chan, Sarah Charlesworth, Roberto Cuoghi, Tacita Dean, Nicole Eisenman, Urs Fischer, Hans Haacke, Camille Henrot, Carsten Höller, Kahlil Joseph, Ragnar Kjartansson, Klara Liden, Sarah Lucas, Goshka Macuga, Gustav Metzger, Marta Minujín, Albert Oehlen, Chris Ofili, Raymond Pettibon, Carol Rama, Pipilotti Rist, Peter Saul, Anri Sala, Jim Shaw, Andra Ursuta, Nari Ward, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others. Gioni’s group shows and thematic exhibitions—which include After Nature; Ghosts in the Machine; Here and Elsewhere; NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star; Ostalgia; The Keeper; and in 2009 the inaugural New Museum Triennial—have become signature initiatives of the New Museum program.
In 2020 he served as a curatorial advisor to the exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America which was originally conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor for the New Museum, and realized thanks to the collaboration of curatorial advisors Naomi Beckwith, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash. Since 2003 Gioni has been directing the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a nomadic museum that has commissioned and produced solo exhibitions, special projects, and interventions in abandoned buildings, public spaces, and forgotten monuments of the city of Milan. For the Trussardi Foundation, Gioni has organized major exhibitions and public art projects by, among others: Allora & Calzadilla, Pawel Althamer, Darren Almond, John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Tacita Dean, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Cyprien Gaillard, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal. In 2015, in the occasion of the Expo Milan 2015, he curated The Great Mother at Palazzo Reale—a group show that analyzed the iconography of motherhood in the art and visual culture of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries—and in 2017 he has organized The Restless Earth at La Triennale. In 2019 at Museo Jumex, in Mexico City, he curated Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even, which, with over 500,000 viewers, was the most visited exhibition in the history of the institution. In 2019 he also organized the exhibition The Warmth of Other Suns - Stories of Global Displacement, a collaboration between the Phillips Collection and the New Museum, presented at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.
In 2017 he curated the exhibition Giuseppe Penone: Matrice, produced by Fendi at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome. Gioni was also part of the commission that selected Giuseppe Penone’s “Leaves of Stone” to be the first artwork to be permanently installed in the historic center of the city or Rome. Since 2015 he has organized the presentation of the Tony and Elham Salame Collection at the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut, where he has curated four exhibitions, titled respectively New Skin (2015), Good Dreams, Bad Dreams: American Mythologies (2016), The Trick Brain (2017) and The Lyrical and The Prosaic: Urs Fischer (2019). He was part of the curatorial team of Monument to Now (Athens, 2004) and of The Fractured Figure (Athens, 2007), two exhibitions originated by the Deste Foundation and Dakis Joannou collection in Athens with which Gioni frequently collaborates. In 2012 he was the curator of the first exhibition by an international contemporary artist in Qatar, where he organized Ego, a survey of Takashi Murakami’s work. He is currently working on Jeff Koons - Lost in America to be presented in Doha on the occasion of the US Year of Culture in Qatar. He was a “comrade” of the 2008 Sydney Biennial; and an advisor for the 2007 Lyon Biennial. Besides these institutional commitments, Massimiliano Gioni carries out independent projects and more flexible activities. With Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, he founded The Wrong Gallery, a miniscule, non-for-profit exhibition space formerly located in New York and then hosted in the collection of the Tate Modern in London. In 2012, with Maurizio Cattelan, he also funded Family Business, a non-for-profit gallery open to collaborations and irreverent exhibition formats currently hosted by the Palais De Tokyo in Paris. In 2010, to celebrate the Tate Modern first ten years anniversary, Gioni, Cecilia Alemani and Maurizio Cattelan were invited to organize a festival of non-for-profit organizations in the Turbine Hall. A former US editor of Flash Art magazine (for which he served from 1999 to 2003), Massimiliano Gioni has contributed to many publications and magazines including Artforum, Frieze, Parkett, Tate Etc. and ArtPress, among the others. He has collaborated on many editorial projects, and with Cattelan and Subotnick he has also directed the independent art magazines “The Wrong Times” and “Charley”. He has published regular monthly columns in the Italian magazines Wired (March 2009 – May 2012) and Rolling Stone (January 2011 – May 2012). From 2011 to May 2012 he served as the visual arts editor for the architecture magazine Domus. In 2013 he founded and acts as the commissioning editor of 2000 Words, a series of monographic books on young contemporary artists published by the Deste Foundation. Gioni has lectured on contemporary art in museums and universities, among which: CCA, Kytakyushu, Japan; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee; Yale University, New Haven; New York University, New York; School of Visual Arts, New York; Columbia University, New York; Kunstverein, Hamburg; Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf; Sitac, Mexico City; and Stadtschule, Frankfurt. He has served as a juror for the following prizes and awards: Absolut Vodka Art Award, BMW Art Jouney, Hugo Boss Prize, Mario Merz Prize, Edvard Munch Art Award, Pinchuk Art Prize, Preis der Nationalgalerie-Hamburger Banhof, Kurt Schwitters Prize, Vilcek Prize.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Scott Rudd