The exhibition “Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible”, conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, opens to the public, where it will be on view free of charge until November 30, 2025

If you have ever wondered where the beautiful things in Milan are hidden, you must look between its folds, like the pages of a book. In the Fashion District, at Via Sant’Andrea 6, there is a special place you cannot miss. It is Palazzo Morando, a refined Baroque building that today houses a museum dedicated to the historical memory and costume of the city of Milan.

Palazzo Morando was once the residence of Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini (1876–1945), a prominent figure in Milanese society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A cultured woman and patron of the arts, the Countess built an extraordinary library devoted to disciplines then considered eccentric and marginal—alchemy, theosophy, spiritualism, esotericism, and occultism—a collection now preserved in the Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana. A great philanthropist and benefactress, but also a passionate collector of “forbidden” texts, she even obtained a dispensation from the Milanese Curia to continue her studies in fields deemed unorthodox. Her Milanese salon was a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, and experimenters drawn to the new frontiers of occult thought.

It is from the story of this woman—perhaps eccentric by today’s standards, but perfectly in tune with the trends of her time—that the exhibition conceived and produced by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando takes shape: Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini.

The project, designed specifically for the spaces of Palazzo Morando, emerges from a dialogue with the palace itself—its history and its collections—creating an exchange between the Countess’s legacy and artistic explorations that, from the 19th century to the present day, have probed the mystery of the invisible.

The title evokes the mythological figure of Fata Morgana, a legendary character from Arthurian lore, guardian of secrets and illusions, often associated with mysterious places such as Avalon—the threshold between the world of the living and the dead. In the collective imagination, she is a powerful sorceress—sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel—capable of enchantments, spells, and deceptions. In more recent interpretations, however, she appears as a free, independent, and nonconformist woman who lives without bending to society’s rules.

The exhibition draws inspiration from the poem Fata Morgana, written in 1940 by André Breton during his exile in Marseille while fleeing the Nazi advance. In those visionary pages, filled with sudden apparitions and cryptic oracles, Breton conjured an elsewhere where the visible and invisible blur, where dream and reality intertwine until their boundaries dissolve.

Through more than two hundred and eighty-six works—paintings, photographs, films, documents, drawings, sculptures, and ritual objects—the exhibition forms a constellation of seventy-eight figures: mediums, mystics, visionaries, and contemporary artists who have sought to open passages between the earthly world and invisible dimensions.

The show explores the intersections between visual arts and mysticism, paranormal phenomena, spiritualism, esotericism, theosophy, and symbolic practices—demonstrating how pursuits once considered eccentric or marginal have disrupted established conventions, redefining the role of art in society. The result is a true atlas of the invisible, populated by ecstasies, apparitions, and mediumistic visions that restore the imaginative power of experiences capable of redrawing the very boundaries of art.

Far from seeking to prove the existence of the supernatural, Fata Morgana instead reveals how, from the 19th century to the present, such practices have reflected collective anxieties and desires, questioning the relationships between knowledge and mystery, faith and science, memory and imagination.

Chiara_Fumai, The Book of Evil Spirits

At the centre of the exhibition is a rare and precious group—shown in Italy for the first time—of sixteen canvases by Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), the Swedish painter who, guided by mediumistic experiences and spiritualist séances, embarked in 1906 on a radically innovative path. She developed a wholly original abstract and symbolic artistic language, predating the experiments of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, traditionally regarded as pioneers of abstraction.

Af Klint’s works, concealed for decades according to the artist’s own wishes, today represent one of the most enigmatic and revolutionary chapters in modern art history: visual transcriptions of messages from beyond, of invisible and immaterial forces finding a privileged channel through painting. In her works, cosmic geometries and organic motifs intertwine—astral visions and spiritual symbols giving rise to a pictorial cosmology that anticipated the great revolutions of 20th-century art and has only recently gained full international recognition.

Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible does not seek to affirm the existence of the supernatural but rather to recount how, at various historical moments, practices deemed eccentric have managed to subvert artistic and social conventions, challenging gender hierarchies, scientific authorities, and the limits of rational thought. In an age marked by new forms of obsession and neurosis, by disinformation and fascination with mystery, the exhibition also reflects on the dangerous relationships between technology, spirituality, and power.

Through a network of visual narratives—from diagrams of “influencing machines” conceived in 19th-century psychiatric contexts to spirit photography and records of mediumistic séances—Fata Morgana composes an atlas of the invisible: a mosaic of inner worlds, utopias, mental wanderings, and radical alternatives to dominant rationality.

With a selection of seventy-eight figures, both historical and contemporary, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi invites viewers to reconsider the role of the marginal, the inexplicable, and the visionary in artistic creation. Guided by an internationally experienced curatorial team—bringing together for the first time in Italy two former Directors of the Venice Biennale—the project transforms Palazzo Morando into a portal toward other dimensions, suspended between past and present, imagination and reality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Italian-English book edited by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini, published by Electa (Pesci Rossi series). More than a catalogue in the strict sense, it is a 248-page addendum that explores the exhibition’s stories, recounting the biographies of the represented artists alongside 87 colour images illustrating the works on display, accompanied by monographic texts and essays dedicated to the featured figures.

With a preface by Beatrice Trussardi, the book includes essays by Jennifer Higgie (writer and critic specialising in women in art history), Vivienne Roberts (expert in mediumistic art), and Julia Voss (art historian and biographer of Hilma af Klint). The edition also features the translation of André Breton’s poem Fata Morgana, intertwining history, art, and mysticism.

Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini
An exhibition conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine
Palazzo Morando, Via Sant’Andrea 6, 20121 Milan
October 9 – November 30, 2025
FREE ADMISSION — Tuesday to Sunday, closed Monday, 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM