Curated sections

Organized by Fiera Milano and directed by Nicola Ricciardi, miart, Milan’s international modern and contemporary art fair, returns from April 17 to 19, 2026, with a VIP preview on April 16, for its 30th edition. Bringing together 160 galleries from 24 countries, for the first time in the new South Wing of Allianz MiCo, the fair unfolds across three levels, where visitors will encounter, alongside Established, the fair’s main section, three further curated sections and special projects: Emergent on level one, Established Anthology on level two, and Movements on level zero.

Conceived as the starting point of the fair, Emergent, curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, brings together 29 galleries from all around the world, including new participants from Los Angeles, Johannesburg, New York, London, Istanbul, and Warsaw. The section continues to affirm its international profile while foregrounding practices rooted in experimentation and new artistic languages. Across the presentations, a wide range of concerns comes into focus: femininity, identity politics, social structures, climate change, speculative narrative, art history, and popular culture. These themes are explored through painting, sculpture, ceramics, textile works, video, and photography, offering a concise yet expansive view of contemporary artistic production. Painting plays a central role throughout the section, spanning figurative and abstract approaches, while site-specific installations and live interventions introduce more immersive and performative modes of display. Taken together, the projects in Emergent offer a timely portrait of the present, shaped by formal ambition and critical attention to the conditions of contemporary life.

On level two, Established Anthology turns to a different temporal register. Bringing together 20 galleries, the section presents exhibition projects linked by a shared interest in the complexity and transformation of time. Cycles and metamorphoses, oblivion and remembrance, generational shifts and temporal displacements all structure a series of presentations that move across modern and contemporary art. Rather than treating art history as a linear sequence, Established Anthology approaches it as a field of returns, echoes, and reconfigurations. Gathered in a setting far removed from miart’s usual exhibition context—with wooden floors, high ceilings, and a window opening onto the greenery of CityLife park—the works enter into a more intimate and fluid dimension. Here, dialogues between artists, works, and movements generate new correspondences across decades, opening historical material to the questions of the present.

On level zero, Movements, a special project dedicated to the moving image and developed in collaboration with St. Moritz Art Film Festival, marks a new direction for miart. Curated by Stefano Rabolli Pansera, Artistic Director of SMAFF, the program brings together 20 films by artists represented by 15 galleries participating in miart 2026, creating a dialogue between the fair and the festival’s engagement with experimental cinema. The program is structured around If Music, the theme of the festival’s fifth edition. Organized into five “movements”—Matter and Landscape, Voice and Translation, Rhythmic Space, Choreography, and Rhythm of Labor—the project explores the moving image through a musical logic. Across the works, music is less a subject than a method: a way of reorganizing image, time, and space. Sound is variously displaced, embodied, imagined, or made visible, opening forms of perception that exceed the conventions of narrative cinema. In this sense, Movements extends miart’s openness to a broader range of artistic languages, bringing artists’ film and video into the fair’s curatorial framework for the first time.

Distributed across three distinct yet connected levels, Emergent, Established Anthology, and Movements expand the narrative of miart 2026, reinforcing the fair’s commitment to experimentation, historical inquiry, and the plurality of contemporary artistic practice.