For Milan Design Week 2026, HoperAperta presents the exhibition “CLOSE UP – The shapes of time”, curated by Maurizio Barberis and Patrizia Catalano, with the coordination of Martina Barberis Casagrande. It will take place from 16 to 25 April 2026 at Museo Mangini Bonomi, via dell’Ambrosiana 20, Milan.
In the refined courtyard of the Museo Mangini Bonomi, HoperAperta proposes a collection of unique pieces—works of art and design—understood as the manifestation of a poetic imagination. Each individual piece is conceived through a series of “literary” processes: a system of places that store image-memories, a wandering of forms understood as an art of metissage, where painting, photography and sculpture, as well as design and architecture, converge to lead to a circularity of the authorship process. This movement takes us from function to form, from form to image, from memory to invention, and from invention back to memory.
Form, in this sense, contains the entire temporal sequence of an image: in the present, the past and the future are staged as inseparable elements within the system in which the image is situated. Each object is placed within its own system and possesses its own sequence, determined by the continuous movement of points and lines in the space generated by the poetic imagination.
The temporal sequence therefore becomes a narrative movement that leads nowhere in particular, yet includes within itself the entire narrative development.
The exhibition is made in collaboration with: 5Vie Art + Design and Museo Mangini Bonomi.
Technical partners: Grassi Pietre, Manualis, MTPlex, Orrefors, Danilo Trogu, Zeus.
Works by Maurizio Barberis, Armando Bruno and Alberto Torres, Claesson Koivisto Rune, Alfonso Femia AF*Design, Duccio Grassi, Steve Piccolo, Carmelo Zappulla.
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