In conjunction with Milano Art Week 2025, the Fondazione Henraux, in collaboration with GAM–Galleria d’Arte Moderna, presents The Four Faces of A Man, an exhibition by the Egyptian–Canadian artist of Armenian origin, Anna Boghiguian (1946, Cairo). The exhibition project, curated by Edoardo Bonaspetti, enacts within the rooms of the museum a dialogue between the works of the permanent collection and the artist’s recent output, including a series of new sculptures made of marble, a material Boghiguian has engaged with for the first time, having won the Henraux Sculpture Commission prize at miart 2024.

Boghiguian uses numerous expressive languages, from drawing and painting to writing and installation, in order to address themes bound up with history, politics, colonialism, and the human condition, with a multilayered practice that interweaves narrative and social critique. The artist reflects on the interactions between past and present phenomena, showing how the same dynamics of hope, ambition, and conflict are constantly reactivated throughout history. Her works thus become interconnected expressive pathways, open to myriad forms of reworking, in accordance with a vision that sees existence and time as continual metamorphoses. For Boghiguian, it is an ineluctable fate: everything moves incessantly, a relentless cycle, where every end dissolves into a new beginning. Under this scenario, the late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century works in GAM’s neoclassical collection—testaments to a precise symbolic order of the world and shot through with references to ancient Greco-Roman art—enter into a dialogue with the artist’s contemporary creations. The stratification of references and the interlacing of narratives and temporalities also drove her to reinterpret the subjects of her works, in terms of both materials and forms, as if to embody the instability of being. The four marble sculptures, four possible faces of a man, are variants of four clay heads, which in turn recast some of her previous works depicting people walking or running, as well as a sphinx. The mythological creature—whose name in ancient Egyptian means “living image”—also returns in a series of three bronze sculptures that seem to guard or monitor the rooms of the museum, perhaps to protect us from today’s troubled and threatening reality. In the incessant, repetitive flow of time, marked by contradictions and mechanisms of power, the artist’s understanding, sensitivity, and poetic sensibility combine to link up remote cultures and places. Underpinning her approach is a deep sense of freedom, a sincere empathy towards humanity, and a concept of life as a journey without end, full of changes and challenges. Art, declares Boghiguian, can serve as a vital source of energy, a process of healing for the soul, and a power with which to alleviate the damage caused by the sorrows of existence.

Since 1903, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna has preserved modern art collections owned by the City of Milan; an artistic heritage encompassing more than 3,500 works that have been housed in the heart of the city at the splendid Villa Reale venue since 1921.

Designed between 1790 and 1796 by Leopoldo Pollack (a pupil of Giuseppe Piermarini) for the Count Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Villa Reale later became the official residence of the Viceroy of Italy Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s stepson, who commissioned the completion of the sumptuous interior décor. The Villa stands as one of the most noteworthy examples of Milanese Neoclassic architecture, overlooking a luxuriant romantic English garden.

Antonio Canova, Andrea Appiani, Francesco Hayez, Tranquillo Cremona, Giovanni Segantini, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Giovanni Boldini, Medardo Rosso, and Gaetano Previati are just some of the outstanding artists exhibited in its permanent collection, the undisputed protagonists of Milanese and Italian history of art. The richly layered collection of the Galleria boasts masterpieces from the 19thand 20th centuries that arrived to the museum thanks also to private collectors and the donations from important families such as Grassi and Vismara, showcasing works by major artists including Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani.

In the 1950’s, architect Ignazio Gardella was entrusted with the design of the Grassi Collection setup; his project fully reflected an idea that today is well established, but that at the time was pure avant-garde: a museum intended as a living organism and in constant transformation. Recently restored, Gardella’s setup today is one of the rare examples of museographic institution able to wed rationalist rigour with respect for the past, thanks to a wide range of innovative solutions that meet the expressive needs of the architect, while satisfying the requirements imposed by the collection and the exhibition space.

Today, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna is committed to exhibition activity exploring a dialogue with the applied arts, contemporary expressions and the thematic analysis of artists present in its permanent collection.

Text: GAM - Galleria d'Arte Moderna