MASI LUGANO. EXHIBITION PROGRAMME 2025

THE PROGRAMME

The MASI exhibitions programme 2025 will be dedicated to visual arts of Switzerland, and especially from Ticino, tracing a dynamic and international itinerary. They will be events marked by an original rediscovery and combinations, stories of meetings and creative synergies.
The organisation of the events will inaugurate the artist Louisa Gagliardi’s exhibition, one of the most interesting exponents of the contemporary Swiss art scene. In spring 2025, MASI will inaugurate the exhibiting project “Ferdinand Hodler – Filippo Franzoni”, proposing a unique comparison between two artists who were protagonists of the contemporary art development in Switzerland between nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in different ways. The autumn season will continue with the widest retrospective ever dedicated to one of the biggest proponents of international geometric abstract art, Richard Paul Lohse, during the last twenty years. The collective “Carona. The Lost Paradise 1968-1978: David Weiss and the Artists of Casa Aprile” will direct his gaze at Ticino, as a heart of creative convergences and meetings. Already in the past, the research into photography led to the rediscovery of the precious artist archives and will continue in 2025 with an exhibition on Eugenio Schmidhauser. This photographer was active at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was part of that important field of historical photography that testified to the social, cultural and economic evolution of a territory.
In the end, with the inauguration of “Feeling and observation”, the focus on the museum collection and the evolution of art history in Ticino will continue, strongly marked by influences coming from South and from North.

THE EXHIBITIONS

The great springtime exhibition “Ferdinand Hodler – Filippo Franzoni” will celebrate the friendship and bond between the two protagonists of the Swiss artistic scene between nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the occasion, an important selection of Filippo Franzoni’s paintings (Locarno,1857 – Mendrisio, 1911), will be compared to Ferdinand Hodler’s works coming from the most important Swiss public and private collections in an unprecedented dialogue, including the least famous works as well.
Points of convergence and disagreements between the two artists will be highlighted in a fascinating comparison between about 80 works concerning the period between 1870 and 1910. In spite of Hodler and Franzoni moved initially in different cultural spheres, the Genevan environment for the first one and the Lombard-Milanese one for the second one, the two artists’ careers met in the nascent Swiss artistic scene, where both participated actively to panels of judges and exhibitions of national and international importance. Simultaneously, different works will reveal a common attraction towards similar landscape glimpses and atmospheric grandeurs (headquarters LAC, 13.04.2025 – 10.08.2025

Louisa Gagliardi: Many Moons

Digital technology and traditional painting techniques blend into Louisa Gagliardi’s work (1989, Sion, Svizzera), one of the most interesting exponents of the contemporary Swiss scene. MASI will host her first exhibition in a Swiss museum: “Louisa Gagliardi: Many Moons”.
For the occasion the artist will create a new series of paintings and sculptures to exhibit in a custom-made itinerary developed for the LAC underground space. Getting from art history to the cinema, from advertising and to personal experiences, Gagliardi realizes compositions full of unexpected details, capable of evoking contrasting feelings between intimacy and unfamiliarity. The artist creates a fascinating imaginary by which she becomes the proponent of her generation and the deep change that characterises the post-internet era where we live. She places herself inside artistic movements like surrealism, metaphysic and magical realism. Additionally, the latest works are part of the project, concerning dear topics to Louisa Gagliardi: some of them will be the relationship with nature and urban space, the perception of domestic sphere and interpersonal relationships (headquarters LAC, 16.02.2025 – 20.07.2025)

Richard Paul Lohse

The autumn season will continue according to the rediscovery and the new gazes towards Swiss personalities who had significant influences around the international artistic landscape. The MASI will dedicate a wide retrospective to Richard Paul Lohse (Zurich, 1902 – 1908), after the work has been presented over twenty years since the last exhibition. The artist’s parabola will be recreated through over 80 paintings including the four fundamental decades of his career, from the 1940s to her death. The exhibition will reveal the historical contingencies, the social utopias and the charm of colour that hide themselves behind the accuracy of Lohse’s works (headquarters LAC, 07.09.2025 – 11.01.2026)

AN ITINERARY IN THE NAME OF ART

Instead, a happy chapter of the most recent Ticino and international artistic history will be explored for the first time, by the exhibition “Carona. The Lost Paradise 1968-1978: David Weiss and the Artists of Casa Aprile”. The project will honour the lively and dynamic artistic and literary community that was born in Carona during the decade 1968-1978, around Casa Aprile. This special place, owned by the artist Meret Oppenheim, became an epicentre of cultural and creative dense exchanges. The utopian dreams and the deep artistic vitality of that period will be re-evoked clearly through the exhibition and the artist David Weiss (Zurich, 1946 – 2012) and his circle of friends and artists’ work, making Carona an artistic exploration and innovation centre. The experimental and collaborative spirit of that particular moment will be brought back by a rare selection of designs, original sketches, personal letters, photos and auditory recordings (headquarters LAC, 28.09.2025 – 01.02.2026)

Palazzo Reali will host an exhibition on Eugenio Schmidhauser’s work (Seon, 1876 – Astano, 1952). This event will be precisely in continuity with the MASI organisation, having carried out an investigation and rediscovery work of valuable artist archives in recent years.
“Eugenio Schmidhauser – Oltre il Malcantone” (“Eugenio Schmidhauser – Over the Malcantone”) will be the first exhibition dedicated to the Swiss photographer by the museum. It will bring to light the artist’s work that shaped strongly the imagination of Ticino in the early century, helping promote the region’s tourism in new ways. Thanks to the partnership with the Ticino’s National Archives, the itinerary will present about 90 photographic works between new and vintage-prints: they represent extensive records, from which the deep relationship of Schmidhauser emerges with landscapes, villages and citizens of the area, especially in Malcantone. Additionally, an unpublished nucleus of artistic photographs will be part of the exhibition, revealing the unknown aspects of great value concerning his work (Palazzo Reali, from 16.03.2025 – 12.10.2025)

The programme 2025 will be integrated by the presentation of MASI collections in the exhibition “Sentiment and observation. Art in Ticino 1850-1950” at the LAC headquarters. The exhibition will be full of some important works on loan and will intend to offer a point of view concerning how art in Ticino developed dynamically in his specific cultural contest, and to show what influences, coming from South and from North, established themselves in the region, starting from the establishment of Federal State in 1848 to the end of Second World War.