RAMM:ELL:ZEE TIME:LINE

Museion presents RAMM:ELL:ZEE: TIME:LINE, the only Italian presentation of the first comprehensive European retrospective devoted to RAMMELLZEE (1960–2010). Curated by Hugo Vitrani and Cédric Fauq, with exhibition design by Pascal Rodriguez, the exhibition spans two floors and brings together more than 150 works, the majority never previously shown in Italy, offering an extensive view of the artist’s radical and multifaceted practice. Developed in collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the Capc Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, TIME:LINE marks the final chapter of a three-part European exhibition project. 

Building on Museion’s 2025 exhibition Graffiti, the first institutional survey in Italy dedicated to the relationship between graffiti and contemporary fine art, TIME:LINE extends the museum’s research into non-violent forms of resistance and art as a social and urban practice. A central figure in Graffiti, RAMMELLZEE now becomes the subject of a deeper exploration of how language, identity, and visual culture can operate as forces of resistance. 

Artist, theorist, sculptor, performer, and Master of Ceremonies, RAMMELLZEE was one of the most influential and least classifiable figures of the New York art and hip-hop scenes of the 1980s. He adopted his name in 1979, setting it out as an equation, and that same year published a treatise establishing the two theories that would govern his work for the next thirty years: Gothic Futurism and Iconoclastic Panzerism. Language, he argued, was an instrument of control, and its letters had to be redesigned as visual weapons in order to break that control. Ornament became weaponry. 

As its title indicates, the exhibition is conceived as a timeline. Four parallel chronologies run through the exhibition spaces: RAMMELLZEE’s life, art and culture, science and technology, and society and politics. Designed by Francesco Bevilacqua, the timeline begins in 1801 with the discovery of ultraviolet radiation and passes through Marinetti’s “words-in-freedom,” the invention of aerosol paint, and the assassination of Malcolm X. Together, the chronologies connect RAMMELLZEE’s practice to a broader history of artistic, technological, and political developments. 

Two groups of loans secured for the Bolzano chapter make that history explicit. Three illuminated codices from the Abbey of Novacella, in the Isarco Valley, are shown alongside RAMMELLZEE’s paintings: a fourteenth-century Speculum iudicale produced in Bologna, a Lectionarium Missae from the abbey’s scriptorium, and an early sixteenth-century musical and astronomical miscellany. They give material form to the lineage of medieval scribes that RAMMELLZEE claimed for himself in 1979. Works by Fortunato Depero place Futurist typographic experimentation alongside RAMMELLZEE’s armed letters, marking the point at which he took up the formal apparatus of Italian Futurism while turning its militancy against the languages of domination. 

The exhibition also follows the artist’s own routes through Italy. He showed with gallerist Lidia Carrieri, performed at Valentino’s twenty-fifth anniversary in Milan in 1984, was interviewed by Bologna critic Francesca Alinovi, and between 1984 and 1988 produced a series of paintings on marble in Martina Franca, Puglia. “My style has not broken with the art of illumination,” he said of that period. “I simply went further. I completed my letters by constructing them.” 

At the centre of the exhibition stands Gasholear, the exoskeleton RAMMELLZEE built between 1987 and 1998 and wore in performance, alongside the Letter Racers, the Garbage Gods and Monster Models, and the mirrored pyramid designed with his wife, Carmela Zagari Rammellzee, to hold his ashes. Museion also presents a group of crown-bracelets discovered in the artist’s storage and never previously shown in public. 

RAMMELLZEE’s work is shown alongside artists who surrounded him and those who followed, among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Futura 2000, Phase 2, Dondi White, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Martin Wong, David Hammons, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Arthur Jafa. Photographs by Henry Chalfant, Maripol, and Gianni Pettena, and films by Charlie Ahearn and Jim Jarmusch, document the scene in which the artist moved.