Image: Exhibition poster for ‘La forma consumata. Arman, Rotella, Warhol’, RISO – Museo Regionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Palermo
An exhibition bringing together Andy Warhol, Arman and Mimmo Rotella is on view at Palermo’s Real Albergo delle Povere, in spaces that expand the exhibition programme of RISO – Museo Regionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. ‘La forma consumata. Arman, Rotella, Warhol’ presents 81 works and examines the changing status of the object and the icon in contemporary visual culture. The exhibition runs from 12 June through 27 December 2026.
Promoted by Sicily’s Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity and produced by RISO with Bottega Creativa, the exhibition is curated by Alberto Fiz with the collaboration of Edoardo Falcioni. The works, drawn from private collections, date from 1954 to 2004. They include 35 works by Warhol—among them acrylics and screenprints on paper and canvas—18 accumulations and sculptures by Arman, and 27 works by Rotella, including décollages, artypos and photographic transfers.
The presentation also includes ‘Rejected Flowers’, a 1970 accumulation made jointly by Arman and Warhol. Other works identified in the exhibition materials include Warhol’s ‘Hammer & Sickle’ (1977), ‘Mao’ from the ‘Reversal Series’, ‘Electric Chair’, ‘Mick Jagger’ and ‘James Dean’; Arman’s ‘In Favor of Admission’, ‘Bird of Paradise’, ‘Impronte’ and ‘Violoncello’; and Rotella’s ‘Assemblage San Pellegrino’, ‘Dux’, ‘L’Auto Perfetta’ and ‘Autoritratto napoleonico’.
Rather than following a strictly chronological structure, the exhibition is arranged around eight thematic groupings. ‘Ritratti’ considers identity and self-representation through Warhol’s ‘Autoritratto’ (1977), portraits of Arman made by Warhol and Rotella’s ‘Autoritratto napoleonico’. ‘Riproducibilità’ focuses on serial imagery and multiplication, while ‘Politica’ and ‘Marilyn’ address the construction of collective imagery, power, trauma and myth through works featuring political symbols and the actress’s media image.
The remaining sections—‘Celebrities’, ‘Sovrapposizioni’, ‘Materie’ and ‘Con tutto’—extend the investigation into celebrity, layered images and residual materials. The display places Warhol’s portraits of Mick Jagger, James Dean and Alessandro Magno alongside Rotella’s décollages and artypos and Arman’s explorations of imprint and accumulation. In ‘Materie’, Arman’s ‘Untitled’, a violin cut apart and suspended in resin, exemplifies the exhibition’s attention to the transformation of familiar objects.
The exhibition connects the three artists through their different approaches to accumulation, décollage, appropriation and serial repetition. Its framing draws on the history of Nouveau Réalisme, founded by Pierre Restany in 1960, a movement in which Arman and Rotella participated. The exhibition materials position that European practice in dialogue with American Pop Art, particularly around the relationships among objects, icons, reproducibility and mass communication.
The Real Albergo delle Povere, an eighteenth-century structure, recently underwent a museum-conversion project intended to expand its exhibition capacity while preserving the building’s historic character. The exhibition is accompanied by portraits of Arman, Rotella and Warhol by Fabrizio Garghetti. It is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Sundays and public holidays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.; the last admission is at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays and Saturdays and 12:30 p.m. on Sundays and holidays. Admission was free through 30 June; the listed prices are now €8 standard and €4 reduced.
