Participating Artists: Carlo Alfano (Naples, 1932 – 1990) / Thomas Bayrle (Berlin, 1937) / Luciano Fabro (Turin, 1936 – Milan, 2007) / Simone Fattal (Damascus, 1942) / Giorgia Garzilli (Naples, 1992) / Eva Giolo (Brussels, 1991) / Piero Golia (Naples, 1974) / Mimmo Jodice (Naples, 1934 – 2025) / Rashid Johnson (Chicago, 1977) / Allan Kaprow (Atlantic City, 1927 – Encinitas, 2006) / Rosa Panaro (Casal di Principe, 1935 – Naples, 2022) / Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio (Pozzuoli, 1972) / Cindy Sherman (New Jersey, 1954) Frances Stark (Newport Beach, 1967) / Eric Wesley (Los Angeles, 1973). 

The exhibition format in progress The years is developed in chapters and is dedicated to the exploration of episodes of art history from the most recent decades in Naples. The Madre collection engages with important public and private collections, mainly from the city, to evoke, through emblematic works, significant moments and artistic productions that have taken place in this territory. The first exhibition chapter was held from December 19, 2024, to June 30, 2025.

The title The years refers to the eponymous novel by writer Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize in Literature 2022, in which the description of photographs and memories of important moments in a single life becomes both an autobiographical fresco and a collective and historiographical chronicle. The novel warns that private images and memories are destined to disappear in the flow of history; this exhibition proposes to consider works of art as an antidote to this process of dissolution. Over time, past the urgency of the relationship with the current events in which they were conceived, the works are able to tell both their aesthetic and linguistic research, and the context in which they were produced and exhibited. In turn, the collections in which they are preserved can be considered, from this perspective, as repositories of stories, events, and passages that are part of a shared experience.

The constructed narrative, marked in moments and episodes, is signaled by the placement of posters indicating the years in which the selected works were exhibited in Campania, offered to the shared memory that this exhibition celebrates. To complete this trajectory and confirm the vitality of the research constantly conducted by the Madre on the present, The years also includes artists exhibiting in Naples for the first time: for this second chapter, Eva Giolo. Furthermore, the experimentation of an exhibition model continues in which an artist from the Campania region, in this case Giorgia Garzilli, is offered the opportunity to curate a room exhibition based on the Madre collection, understood as a basin of cultural, formative, and ideational reference.

The exhibition path, like the structure of memories, is not chronological.

For each work to become, in addition to being an emblem of artistic research and a specific socio-political moment, also an antidote to the disappearance of shared historical memory (a danger described by Ernaux), the exhibition has in its public program a true and proper constitutive element. During the exhibition period, meetings, conversations, and visits account for the liveliness of the Neapolitan artistic scene in recent art history, contextualizing it in a broader historiographical perspective. The exhibited works thus become a palimpsest on which to build historical-artistic, political, anthropological, and sociological narratives, in line with a conception of the museum as a place for the production of transdisciplinary thought.