From March 14 to August 23, 2026, the Foundation Palazzo Strozzi presents "Rothko in Florence”, one of the most significant exhibitions ever dedicated in Italy to Mark Rothko, exponent of theabstract expressionism and an undisputed master of modern art. Curated by his son Christopher and art consultant Elena Geuna, the exhibition is complemented by two special sections, one at the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
Who is Mark Rothko: the master of abstract expressionism?
Rothko, born in Latvia in 1903 but moved with his family to the United States – where he committed suicide in 1970 – is famous for his famous Color field paintings, gigantic paintings depicting essential floating rectangles on the canvas and dominated by very few colors, without a subject and, often, not even a title.
The artist is recognized, in fact, as one of the greatest exponents of abstract expressionism, a movement that developed overseas in the post-war period, starting from the visions of Kandinsky and PollockThrough his "colored rectangles," Rothko deconstructs reality and takes surrealism, abstraction, and expressionism to extremes, rendering it introspective and highly symbolic. Rothko strips the work of any connection to objective reality, including the title, thus providing not the representation of an episode but the evocation of its atmosphere.
He does this to emotionally involve the spectator and bring him to a state of intimate and almost mystical contemplation: “I paint large pictures” the artist stated, “because I want to create a state of intimacy. A large painting is an immediate act: it takes you inside itself”. Rothko, adds Arturo Galansino, general director of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, “has redefined the language of 20th-century painting, transforming color into experience, space and meditation”.
Rothko Exhibition in Florence: The Influence of Michelangelo and Beato Angelico on the Artist
On the basis of these statements, the very strong relationship between his deliberately "empty" paintings and Florentine Renaissance art. Rothko, in visit to Florence in 1950 and 1966, was struck by the pictorial representations of the Fra Angelico present in the Convent of San Marco and by the “claustrophobic” Michelangelo representations in the Vestibule of the Laurentian Library.
“After being at work for some time,” he said of it, “I realized that I had been very unconsciously influenced by Michelangelo's walls in the stairwell of the Medici Library in Florence. He achieved exactly the kind of feeling I had in mind. Michelangelo makes viewers feel trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is bang their heads against the wall forever.”
In some of his works one can clearly perceive the influence of 15th-century Italian art and, in particular, of Beato Angelico's fresco technique. Rothko and Angelico shared the 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 fields of color capable of leading viewers into various notions of abstraction and color theory.
Rothko's exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence
The architecture of Palazzo Strozzi and Florence itself thus become the ideal setting to explore how Rothko translated the tension between classical measure and expressive freedom into painting, generating through color a renewed perception of space that transcends the two-dimensional surface of the canvas.
The exhibition brings together over 70 works, many of which never been exhibited in Italy, coming from important international museums and prestigious private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
The exhibition itinerary at Palazzo Strozzi unfolds chronologically, allowing visitors to retraceand Rothko's entire career: from the 30s and 40s, characterized by figurative works in dialogue with Expressionism and Surrealism, up to the 50s and 60s, capable of deeply engaging the viewer through a vocabulary imbued with spirituality and poetry.
Le exhibition sections They retrace the various phases of the artist's research, also documenting his relationship with the Italian artistic tradition. His early works reveal an interest in symbolic and psychological approaches to the figure and in Renaissance spatial construction. This was followed by the Neo-Surrealist paintings of the 40s, which introduced a more fluid metamorphic sensibility, anticipating the dissolution of the figure in the Multiforms series, suspended fields of color that mark his transition to full abstraction.
In the following years, his palette becomes more restrained, ranging from greens and blues to earthy tones from the 60s. 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 Laurentian Library.
Towards the epilogue, the exhibition develops with the works Black and Gray (1969-70) and his works on paper, where the sienna, pink and blue tones achieve a synthesis of introspection and rigor.
“Rothko's personal encounter with Florence revealed to him a tradition in which painting, architecture and contemplation converge,” he states. Elena Geuna, curator of the exhibition.
“My father wanted his viewer to have the same religious experience he had when he made them,” he concludes. Christopher Rothko, curator of the exhibition. “Inspired by his visits to Rome and Florence, that spiritual element becomes even more central.”
