Le strade terminano prima di cominciare. Vincenzo Agnetti e le tracce fotografiche

Curated by Alessandro Castiglioni
In collaboration with the Vincenzo Agnetti Archive

From May 24, 2026

The roads end before they begin. Vincenzo Agnetti and photographic traces is a monographic exhibition dedicated to one of the most important figures in 20th-century Italian Conceptual Art. It was created following the victory of the Strategia Fotografia 2025 competition organized by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, thanks to which the MA*GA acquired a series of works entitled Dopo le Grandi Manovre (After the Great Maneuvers). 

To explore this important addition to the collection, the museum is dedicating an exhibition to Vincenzo Agnetti in the centenary year of his birth. Following on from the exhibition Qui e altrove. Gli ambienti di Paolo Scheggi 1964 – 1971, the exhibition project stems from a close dialogue with the artist's archive and focuses on Agnetti's specific interest in conceptual photography and in a practice that centers on the narrative capacity of the photographic fragment, its decontextualization and recontextualization, the crossing of history and media, and the dialogue with literature and technology. 
The exhibition does not follow a strictly chronological order but explores a series of issues that intertwine narration, photography, and conceptual languages.

At the center is the cycle Dopo le grandi manovre (After the Great Maneuvers), which stems from the rediscovery in Gibraltar of a nineteenth-century collection of Japanese photographs. Agnetti, with a conceptual approach, photographs the shots and poetically combines graphic and textual elements with the revisited photographs. These are works in which irony is sometimes paired with writing, sometimes with graphic signs, in a game of temporal reflections. In this regard, Agnetti wrote in 1979: “They interest me because they are by a poet who used photos. For my part, I wanted to insert myself into this poetic depth.” The exhibition also features some of the artist's most famous works: from Il Trono (The Throne), created with Paolo Scheggi, to Elisabetta d'Inghilterra (Elizabeth of England) and Libro dimenticato a memoria (The Book Forgotten by Memory).  

Vincenzo Agnetti is one of the most significant Italian conceptual artists and photographers of the second half of the 20th century. He began his career alongside Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, collaborating on the launch of Azimuth and contributing to the publication of two issues of the magazine in 1959 and 1960. In 1967, he held his first solo exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, and from that moment on, his work gained international recognition thanks to his participation in several editions of the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, and Documenta V in Kassel in 1972 at the invitation of Harald Szeemann. His works are in the collections of the National Gallery in Rome, the British Museum in London, the Gallery of Modern Art in Turin, and the Mart in Rovereto.