From March 14 to August 23, 2026 Palazzo Stozzi will host the exhibition “Rothko in Florence”. Special sections will be on view at the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
Seventy works, many of which have never been exhibited in Italy before, The retrospective is co-curated by Rothko’s son, Christopher, and Elena Geuna
The Renaissance halls of Palazzo Strozzi host the majestic works of Mark Rothko, the undisputed master of modern American art.
Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, the exhibition traces the master’s entire career with over 70 works from prestigious private collections and major international museums, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The exhibition explores the artist’s evolution from his early figurative works of the 1930s and 1940s—in dialogue with Expressionism and Surrealism—to the famous abstract creations of the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by expansive fields of color.
A deep interest in the symbolic dimension of the figure is evident in his early work, followed by a more fluid vision in the Multiforms series, with fields of color suspended on the canvas, marking the transition toward the immaterial.
In the subsequent monumental, undefined canvases, such as No. 3/No. 13 (1949), light and color invite meditation. In the following years, the hues became more subdued, ranging from greens to blues, and eventually to the brown and red tones of the 1960s. The relationship with architecture reemerges in the studies for the Seagram and Harvard Murals, characterized by intense hues and solemn atmospheres. The journey concludes with the Black and Grey series (1969–1970) and the final works on paper, in which a synthesis of depth and rigor is achieved.
From Palazzo Strozzi, the project extends throughout the city of Florence, involving two places particularly dear to the artist: the Museum of San Marco, where a dialogue is created with the frescoes by Beato Angelico, and the Vestibule of the Laurentian Library, designed by Michelangelo. The exhibition takes the form of a journey through color and light, inviting meditation and introspection, in a constant interplay between abstraction and spirituality
“My father wanted those who viewed his paintings to experience the same religious feeling he had felt while creating them,” says Christopher Rothko, curator of the exhibition. “Inspired by his travels to Rome and Florence, that spiritual element became even more central. Throughout the exhibition, we have created intimate rooms where personal interaction with Rothko’s works is maximized and enhanced by their resonance with the historic rooms themselves.” (source: https://museitoscana.cultura.gov.it/news/rothko-a-firenze/)
“The encounter with Florence revealed to Rothko a tradition in which painting and architecture converge in a contemplative dimension,” says Elena Geuna, curator of the exhibition. “The exhibition places his work within this perspective, where the meditative stillness of Beato Angelico’s frescoes at the Museum of San Marco and the spatial tension of Michelangelo’s vestibule in the Laurentian Library echo in the pursuit of a painting capable of expressing the deepest human states of mind.”
“Rothko redefined the language of twentieth-century painting, transforming color into experience, space, and meditation,” states Arturo Galansino, General Director of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. “This exhibition represents a unique project, conceived specifically for Palazzo Strozzi, and was born from the desire to offer a profound encounter with his work, reconstructing all the major phases of his career in our galleries through a wide selection of works, and creating a dialogue between the silent power of his works and the history of the city.” (source: https://museitoscana.cultura.gov.it/news/rothko-a-firenze/)
Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz) was born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903.
At the age of ten, he emigrated with his mother and sister to the United States to join his father and brothers in Portland. From 1921 to 1923, he attended Yale University, later moving to New York. In 1929, Rothko began teaching at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a position he would hold for the next twenty years. In 1935, he was among the founders of the group The Ten, with whom he exhibited until 1940. Between 1936 and 1937, he was part of the easel painting division of the W.P.A. Federal Art Project, painting works for government buildings. In 1940, Mark Rothko founded the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. In the paintings and watercolors created between the late 1930s and 1946, his interest in Greek mythology, primitive art, and psychoanalysis is evident. Influenced by Surrealist painters, he experimented with the technique of automatic drawing, creating abstract forms with allusions to human and animal life. Surrealist-inspired works were exhibited in 1945 in a solo show at Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery. He exhibited several times at the annual exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Toward the end of the 1940s, his painting changed substantially: he abandoned Surrealist-inspired figuration to devote himself to abstract compositions that would become his signature style. Large-scale canvases are composed of flowing, overlapping swaths of color. In 1954, he had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1958, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. That same year, he accepted a commission for a series of paintings for the famous New York restaurant Four Seasons inside the Seagram Building. Rothko later abandoned the project, and the canvases were subsequently donated to the Tate in London, with the stipulation that they be displayed together in a separate room. He exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1962 and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1963. From 1964 to 1967, Rothko worked on a series of paintings commissioned by collectors and patrons Dominique and John de Menil for a chapel in Houston. The chapel, now non-denominational, houses fourteen canvases, corresponding to the Stations of the Cross. In 1969, The Mark Rothko Foundation was established with the aim of providing assistance to artists in need. Severely ill, Mark Rothko took his own life in his New York studio in 1970.
