Rothko in Florence: A major exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence on March, celebrates the master of American Art

From 14 March to 23 August 2026, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents one of the most significant exhibitions ever devoted in Italy to Mark Rothko, the undisputed master of American modern art. Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, Rothko in Florence is a unique project, conceived and produced specifically for Palazzo Strozzi to celebrate the artist’s special relationship
with the city. The architecture of the palazzo and Florence itself become an ideal setting in which to explore how Rothko translated the tension between classical measure and expressive freedom into painting, generating through colour a renewed perception of space that transcends the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Organised chronologically, the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi retraces Rothko’s entire career: from the 1930s and 1940s, marked by figurative works in dialogue with Expressionism and Surrealism, to
the 1950s and 1960s, defined by his celebrated classic paintings composed of vast fields of colour capable of profoundly engaging the viewer through a language imbued with spirituality and poetry.

The exhibition features works from major international museums and prestigious private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate in London, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The exhibition brings together over 70 works, many of which have never before been shown in Italy. Its various sections illuminate the different moments of Rothko’s career, also documenting his
deep engagement with the Italian artistic tradition. His early works reveal an interest in symbolic and psychological approaches to the figure and in Renaissance spatial construction, as seen in Interior (1936), whose composition echoes Michelangelo’s tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici in the Sagrestia Nuova of San Lorenzo. These are followed by the neo-Surrealist paintings of the 1940s,
which introduce a more fluid, metamorphic sensibility, anticipating the dissolution of the figure in the so-called Multiforms, suspended colour fields marking his transition towards full abstraction.

In the later large abstract canvases, such as No. 3 / No. 13 (1949) from MoMA in New York or Untitled (1952–1953) from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the artist turns colour and light into tools for meditation. In the following years, his palette becomes more restrained, ranging from greens and blues to the earthy tones of the 1960s. The exhibition highlights the artist’s dialogue with architecture through studies for the Seagram and Harvard Murals, with chromatic portals and closed thresholds also inspired by the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Towards the end, the exhibition unfolds with the Black on Gray works (1969–70) and his late works on paper, where sienna, pink and light-blue tones attain a synthesis of introspection and rigour.

From Palazzo Strozzi, the project extends into the city through two special satellite interventions at locations particularly significant to the artist: the Museo di San Marco, where a selection of works will be presented in dialogue with the frescoes of Fra Angelico, and the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana designed by Michelangelo. Rothko’s first encounter with Florence dates to 1950, during a trip to Italy with his wife Mell. He was deeply moved by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco and by Michelangelo’s architectural vision in the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which would inspire the Seagram Murals painted in the late 1950s—a dialogue that Rothko further developed during his second visit to Florence in 1966.

In some of his more delicate works, one can also perceive the influence of fifteenth century Italian art and, in particular, of Angelico’s fresco technique. Rothko and Angelico shared a desire to evoke a sense of transcendence, a dimension at once distant and profoundly familiar. While Angelico achieved this through the emotional resonance of divine figures in dialogue with earthly
reality, Rothko created colour fields capable of accompanying viewers into different emotional depths, challenging accepted notions of abstraction and colour theory.

Rothko in Florence is promoted and organised by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, in collaboration with the Museo di San Marco (Ministero della Cultura – Direzione regionale Musei nazionali Toscana) and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Public Supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Camera di Commercio di Firenze.

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Private Supporters: Fondazione CR Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo,

Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi.

Biographical Note

Mark Rothko (Markus Rothkowitz) was born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903. At the age of ten, he emigrated with his mother and sister to the United States, joining his father and brothers in Portland. From 1921 to 1923 he attended Yale University before moving to New York. In 1929 he began
teaching at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a position he held for the next twenty years. In 1935 he founded the group The Ten, exhibiting with them until 1940. Between 1936 and 1937 he worked for the Easel Division of the W.P.A. Federal Art Project, painting works for government buildings. In 1940 he co-founded the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.

His paintings and watercolours from the late 1930s to 1946 reveal his interest in Greek mythology, primitive art, and psychoanalysis. Influenced by the Surrealists, Rothko experimented with automatic drawing, creating abstract forms alluding to human and animal life. In 1945, Surrealist-inspired works were shown in his solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York. He also exhibited several times at the annual exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Towards the end of the 1940s, Rothko’s work underwent a decisive shift: he abandoned figuration, including its Surrealist variations, to concentrate on abstract compositions that became his distinctive hallmark. His large-scale canvases were built from floating, layered expanses of colour. In 1954 he held a major solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1958 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. That same year he accepted the celebrated commission for a cycle of paintings for the

Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. Later, Rothko withdrew from the commissioon and these works were donated to Tate in London, with the agreement that they be displayed together in a dedicated room. Further exhibitions followed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de
la Ville de Paris in 1962 and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1963. From 1964 to 1967 Rothko worked on a major cycle commissioned by collectors and patrons Dominique and John de Menil for a Catholic chapel designed by Philip Johnson in Houston. Now an interfaith space. In 1969 the Mark Rothko Foundation was established to provide assistance to artists in need. Mark Rothko committed suicide in his New York studio in 1970.

Cover photo: Mark Rothko Untitled 1952 – 1953 oil on canvas 299.5 × 442.5 cm Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Photo credits: Image © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, photo Erika Barahona