Transitum

Transitum
solo show of artist Fabrizio Cotognini
curated by Marina Dacci

from April 3rd to July 19th, 2025
opening: Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025 from 5PM to 8PM

Additional Exhibition Venue

from April 3rd to July 5th, 2025
GALLERY MOSHE TABIBNIA
via Brera 3, 20121 Milan
Tuesday – Saturday, 10AM – 19PM

From April 3rd to July 19th, 2025, BUILDING GALLERY presents Transitum, a solo exhibition by artist Fabrizio Cotognini, curated by Marina Dacci.

The exhibition, the artist’s first solo project in the gallery spaces, is conceived as an excursus on his artistic research, articulated in several chapters, which are fluidly woven into the exhibition space forming a web of connections.
In this articulated path, a vast selection of more than 90 artworks created specifically for the exhibition, including microfusions, sculptures, installations, and drawings, (some of them made on 18th Century etching, of which Cotognini is passionate collector), finds its place at BUILDING GALLERY.

The exhibition explores and draws heavily on iconographies of the past inspired by epic, mythology, and alchemy.
In this macro-narrative, concepts of transformation, memory, identity, and knowledge take shape: in these, the power of the imagines agentes actualize our relationship with the ancient to interrogate our present.
Thus, the figurative elements of the imagines agentes act as temporal condensations capable of activating our memory.

As curator Marina Dacci observes, “The title of the exhibition becomes a metaphor for the artist’s own posture aimed at continuous research. Transitum narrates an infinite potential of both matter and human nature: nature in relation to man overbearingly appears throughout the exhibition, literally in a bird’s eye view.”

It is precisely a flock of birds, made of bronze micro-castings and titled Hybridatio Mundi (2024-2025), that lay themselves in the gallery spaces as a symbol of union between heaven and earth, between the divine and human worlds. Scattered on the balconies and terraces, as well as in the exhibition path of the three interior floors, the little birds embody par excellence the symbol of rebirth and transformation.

Transformation is precisely what underlies the entire exhibition project by modulating itself on multiple levels:transformation is meant as an evolutionary dimension of the self, but also as an alchemical process of mutation of matter, especially metals. Finally, and at an even deeper level, transformation is intended as a metaphor for one’s journey toward self-realization.

Within this conceptual framework, the ground floor of BUILDING GALLERY proposes the theme of the conversation between nature and culture, placing the micro-casting Alveare (2025) in dialogue with La Casa dell’Arte (2025), a 3D model reproducing the gallery spaces: “a gallery-opificio that welcomes stories and imagination just as the beehive placed in front of this one, that becomes an activator and multiplier of energy to produce nourishment” (Marina Dacci). The two works thus evoke the virtuous dialogue between nature and culture, in which nature becomes an evolutionary model in terms of building and relational functioning for places of culture.

The exhibition continues with a chapter called Distopie (2024), works developed on 18th Century etchings, which are transformed into true aberrations of the contemporary. In fact, the plates juxtapose classical architectures – paradigms of ancient beauty and harmony – with their contemporary branding, the offspring of consumer society: “a futuristic reality that prefigures technological and commercial colonization, and the prevailing bombardment of images, often violent and destructive, to which we are subjected.”

The concept of transformation declined in the idea of “multiple identity,” underlies the portrait cycle Who is Christian Rosenkreutz (2024). As the curator notes, “the series expands the fluid concept of identity transformation from the indefinable to the uncertain, from the esoteric to the plural.” This theme is expressed by the different personalities immortalized in the portraits, also finding a natural development in the works dedicated to L’Androgino e il Doppio (2024) and in Studi sull’Alchimia (2024); among the latter is presented Alchimia Mundi (2025), an artist’s book over five meters long, taken from an English Psalter from the 1400s, that occupies a niche in the exhibition space, unfolding like a waterfall and welcoming rich imagery on the creation of the world.
The ground floor tour concludes with No Monster’s Land (2018) in which the concept of transformation is developed both as hybridization and as a life-death relationship, understood not as an end but as an opportunity for evolution.

On the first floor of the gallery, the exhibition offers a focus on theater – another great passion of Cotognini – understood as a “machine of memory and clairvoyance, an instrument of knowledge and transformation of man and of the world that welcomes him” (Marina Dacci).
Some works from the staging of Parsifal performed in New York in 1904 are the protagonists, installed emulating the semi-cyclical theater structure of Delminian memory. In front of them are presented, in the form of a picture gallery, some ancient etchings of theatrical structures, on which the artist has intervened by inscribing objects and bodies that symbolically connote the crucial passages of the Wagnerian drama.

The long sleeve of the second floor houses the series I 12 Cavalieri della Tavola Rotonda (omaggio a Salvator Rosa) (2024), whose protagonists are inspired by the Knights of the Holy Grail, creating an anchorage with the Wagnerian opera presented in the main space.

The exhibition ends on the second floor of the gallery, where the declination of the concept of transformation is here elaborated as a deep connection between memory and imagination. The protagonists are two optical machines that become loci della memoria, in which the viewer’s possibilities of vision are solicited and enhanced. Two works dedicated to Athanasius Kircher: an anamorphoses presenting two images of Kircher in youth and old age that chase each other and recompose; and a bronze cast of the philosopher’s head as a young man, from which is projected the Swan constellation – a tribute to the Kirkerian idea of the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm – establishing a dialogue with the two works from the series Mappe Celesti (2025): The Song of the Stars – Galileo and The Song of the Stars – John Dee, both developed on original etchings from the 17th Century.

Therefore, with Transitum, the three exhibition floors of BUILDING GALLERY are transformed into an alchemical laboratory, a forge, and a theater. Suggestions that welcome visitors and invite them to immerse themselves in Cotognini’s poetics through an exhibition itinerary that takes on the value of an “education for transformation.”

Transitum exhibition project extends, from April 3rd to July 5th, 2025, in Gallery Moshe Tabibnia, in which the artist proposes a dialogue between textiles from the Moshe Tabibnia Collection and the figure of the swan. The royal swan, a bronze cast made life-size (L’Iperboreo, 2025), rests its legs on two skulls, finding its place in the Sala Brera on the ground floor of the gallery, along with some preparatory drawings.
The swan, a recurring image in Cotognini’s works, is here proposed as a tribute to the mythological figure linked to the cult of Apollo, an emblem of purity and regeneration.