Sara Enrico: Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin

For the seventh edition of the Furla Series program, Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano present Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin: a solo exhibition by Sara Enrico, curated by Bruna Roccasalva.

Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin is a site-specific project which, for the first time since the collaboration between Fondazione Furla and GAM began, will be developed exclusively in the outdoor spaces of the Villa Reale gardens, providing new scope for interaction between contemporary art, the natural landscape, and public spaces.

Sara Enrico is an Italian artist whose sculptural research revolves around notions of surface, materiality and corporeality. Integrating approaches from tailoring, choreography and architecture, and combining materials such as concrete, fabric, and steel with an intuitive use of digital technologies, the artist addresses transformative processes capable of articulating a fluid relationship between body, clothing, and space.

Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin features a series of new productions designed specifically for the unique context of the Villa Reale parklands, stemming from a reflection on the garden as a place where nature is functional to the landscape design: a human construction, modelled according to aesthetic, philosophical or social canons, where natural elements and cultural superstructures intertwine.

Setting out from this dualism between nature and artifice, Sara Enrico devised “a landscape within a landscape” through a series of sculptures that inhabit the garden without blending into it but, on the contrary, triggering a subtle tension between the plant kingdom and a notion of synthetic vitality, between what arises spontaneously and what is the upshot of a deliberate gesture. Ever a place of representation and reflection, the garden here becomes a space of resonance in which the artist’s works dialogue with the surroundings, giving rise to a delicate equilibrium in terms of continuity and friction between the work, the setting, and the audience. 

Approaching the garden as an exceptional exhibition space, the artist has devised five installations located at different points in the park, along a path that crosses it in its entirety.

From the iconic sculptures The Jumpsuit Theme (2023; 2024; 2025), made of concrete and pigment, to the large, colorful installation Beyond the Skin (2025), and up to the new works Carriers (2025), and Bodiless Observer (2025), the exhibition confirms Sara Enrico’s interest in the dialogue between body, surface, and space.

The garden of Villa Reale, with its historical and formal complexity, serves as the ideal setting for a work that has long explored the transformation of matter and the ambiguity between body and object, triggering close confrontation between the natural and the artificial, and giving life to a landscape that is both real and imaginary.

This project represents the seventh event in the Furla Series, the exhibition cycle that Fondazione Furla has been developing since 2017 in partnership with major Italian art institutions, featuring an all-female program designed to celebrate and promote the contributions of female artists to contemporary culture.

Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin was born out of a long-standing partnership between Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, one that began in 2021 and involves a series of annual exhibitions where contemporary art interacts with the museum’s spaces and collection.