The Max Ernst exhibition is at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, from 4 October 2022 to 26 February 2023 .

The exhibition, promoted and produced by the Comune di Milano-Cultura and by Palazzo Reale with Electa , in collaboration with Madeinart , is curated by Martina Mazzotta and Jürgen Pech.

There are over 400 works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, jewelery and illustrated books from museums, foundations and private collections, in Italy and abroad. Among these: the GAM in Turin, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Ca' Pesaro Museum in Venice, the Tate Gallery in London, the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Cantini Museum in Marseille, the State Museums and the Arp Foundation in Berlin, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.

The lengthy work of study and investigation carried out by the curators has made it possible to include among the loans, which boast the presence of about eighty paintings, also works and documents that had not been exhibited to the public for several decades. The immense vastness of themes and experiments in Ernst's work spreads over seventy years of 20th century history, between Europe and the United States, constantly escaping any definition. Pictor doctus, profound connoisseur and visionary interpreter of the history of art, philosophy, science and alchemy, Max Ernst is presented in this context as a humanist in the neo-Renaissance sense. If André Chastel claimed to find in Ernst a sort of "reincarnation of those Rhenish authors of devilry like Bosch", Marcel Duchamp had traced in him "a complete inventory of the different eras of Surrealism".

On the noble floor of the Royal Palace, visitors can immerse themselves in an enthralling itinerary that retraces the adventurous creative parable of the artist, marked by the great historical events of the 20th century and dotted with extraordinary loves, as well as illustrious friendships. The itinerary narrates the biographical events of Ernst, grouping them into 4 major periods, which are in turn divided into 9 thematic rooms that disclose interdisciplinary approaches to his art. An ample, ideal library, that of the artist, made up of illustrated books, study manuals, photographs, objects and documents, winds through the entire itinerary of the exhibition, inviting visitors to engage in games of cross-references and correspondences between sources of inspiration and the works themselves.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog published by Electa and by a series of collateral events which will enliven the opening months of the Max Ernst exhibition , including the Max Ernst review. Between Surrealists and Surrealisms created in collaboration with the MIC, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana.