“Grand Tour” opens its doors in Milan. Tuesday, November 25, 2025, and until January 15, at the Galleria Vik Milano, there will be the inauguration of the exhibition Grand Tour by Adriano Pompa, curated by Alessandro Riva. The event coincides with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and for this occasion, Adriano Pompa wanted to offer a special tribute, a reflection dedicated to the theme of women’s freedom through a symbolic figure from our literary tradition: Angelica from Orlando Furioso.
Pompa will present the work La fuggente (Angelica) (2005, mixed media and pure gold on paper), accompanied by this short text written for the day by Adriano Pompa:
“For the Day Against Violence Against Women, I have chosen one of my drawings dedicated to Angelica from Orlando Furioso.
Her character, pursued and desired by many, is often misrepresented: Angelica rejects her suitors and flees, following only her own feelings, until she finally finds true love. Her freedom of choice triggers madness, jealousy, and anger in others—feelings that are mistaken for “love,” but which are not love. This reminds us how often distorted emotions are used to justify violent behavior, when respect for the desires and will of others should be the foundation of every relationship.
Adriano Pompa, born in Rome in 1965, has lived in Milan since 1990. He is an Italian painter, sculptor, engraver, and ceramist, the son of artist Gaetano Pompa and photographer Dorothee Leendertz.
His artistic research develops a visionary and symbolic language, rooted in art history, mythology, and classical culture. Through oil painting, drawing, copper engraving, terracotta and bronze sculpture, and glazed ceramics, Pompa brings to life archetypal figures, mythological creatures, and narratives suspended between memory and imagination. Manual skill and attention to materials remain central to his poetics.
He has exhibited in Italy and abroad in galleries, museums, and institutions, also participating in important group exhibitions such as the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). His work has been commented on by critics such as Vittorio Sgarbi, Raffaele De Grada, Andrea Tinterri, and others.
Founder of the cultural association Art Marginem Concept Room, he continues his activity between artistic production, research, and the creation of public works.
The Grand Tour exhibition
Grand Tour is presented as an ideal and visionary journey inspired by the myth of the Grand Tour, reinterpreted by Pompa as a mental and pictorial experience. His works, dominated by a symbolic use of gold, populate the spaces of the Vik Milano Gallery with apparitions suspended between myth, dream, and memory, in a poetic dialogue between past and present.
Adriano Pompa transfigures his father’s surrealist legacy into an autonomous and contemporary exploration, stepping into the shoes of an “eighteenth-century traveler with his gaze turned to the present,” blending memory, time, and imagination in a language that is both narrative and symbolic.
The exhibition is a wunderkammer of figurative and abstract inventions that populate the canvases, sculptures, and panels with a personal mythology: knights, dragons, fantastic animals, and walled cities. These apparitions are “suspended between reality and imagination, between myth and dream,” as curator Alessandro Riva has defined them.
The central element of the exhibition is gold, a Fil Rouge used not as a symbol of luxury, but as an emblem of industriousness and emotional vibration, of an iridescent light that adapts to mood and atmosphere. Gold is the thread that unites the eras, transforming the story into a diary of movement, memory, and metamorphosis.
As Vittorio Sgarbi states, Pompa’s painting is “necessary, inevitable, a vice and a reward at the same time”, the expression of an artist who experiences painting as a cognitive mission, capable of transforming memory into matter.
