ROME.- 1+1. The relational years is the first major retrospective in the world dedicated to relational aesthetics, on view at the MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts from 29 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.
Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud with associate curator Eleonora Farina, the exhibition traces the evolution of one of the most influential movements of the new millennium, thirty years after its affirmation.
Born at the dawn of the Internet era and having become a global language over the years, relational aesthetics identifies a set of practices that place human relationships at their core, rather than the artistic object or the artist’s private space.
Proximity, conviviality, micro-utopias and participatory processes are the principles that unite the research of the 45 artists featured in the exhibition, including Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Gabriel Orozco, Santiago Sierra, Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
The exhibition spans Gallery 3 and several spaces throughout the Museum, following a path that does not simply display the works but activates them in space, creating a three-way relationship between the public, architecture, and artistic creation. The terraces of the Gallery host works from the 1990s and 2000s. Upon arriving at the first terrace, visitors are greeted by an announcer who asks for their name and then announces it to those present: this is Pierre Huyghe’s performance Name Announcer. Immediately afterwards, visitors are invited to smell the contents of a small glass vial: Love Drug (PEA) by Carsten Höller contains phenylethylamine, a substance naturally produced by the brain in states of infatuation. The exhibition path thus begins with an intense emotion. The same Carsten Höller invites visitors to a déjà vu with two more olfactory works, Smell of My Father and Smell of My Mother, for which the artist’s parents’ scents were reproduced in a laboratory. Next, visitors encounter an imposing Christmas tree: this is Philippe Parreno’s work Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas. From the first terrace, visitors move to the “1+1” videoroom, an adjacent space where video works by Pierre Huyghe, Grace Ndiritu, Mark Leckey, and Pia Rönicke are presented.
On the second terrace are the large installations of 1+1: Kutlug Ataman’s Column, part of the MAXXI Collection and presented for the first time since the 2009 exhibition; When Do We Need More Tractors? Five Plans by Liam Gillick, a pyre and a series of action plans written on the wall that allow the work to be recreated at home; untitled 1990 (pad thai) by Rirkrit Tiravanija, the relational work par excellence, where the remains of an artistic action carried out by the artist cooking in the exhibition gallery are displayed; Exit Seating by Angela Bulloch, a series of airline seat instructions related to emergency exit rows, created for the first Turner Prize trial in 1997. The ramp guiding visitors through this path is lined with large two-dimensional works by Maurizio Cattelan, including the famous Untitled with gallerist Massimo De Carlo hanging on the wall, Vanessa Beecroft’s VB74 from the MAXXI Collection, and works by Santiago Sierra. On the third terrace, visitors are welcomed by a pile of chocolates and a stack of red sheets: these are Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ works. From here, a series of wall-mounted works opens, almost like a contemporary gallery, including works by Christian Jankowski, Monica Bonvicini, Gillian Wearing, and Cesare Pietroiusti. The Gallery concludes with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s video Riyo, displayed on a large LED wall. Also by the same artist is Tapis de Lecture, where visitors can stop and choose one of the 400 books available on the emerald-colored carpet. Along the ramp descending toward the glass wing, visitors are surrounded by over 4,000 names written on the wall: this is Douglas Gordon’s List of Names (Random), a work reflecting on the memory of all the people he met from 1990 to 2017. In the glass wing, the project enters into dialogue with some precursors of relational aesthetics, such as Lygia Clark with her “relational objects,” Ian Wilson, Sophie Calle with ROOM 44. February 17th / March 1st, recently acquired thanks to the contribution of the Friends of MAXXI, Hélio Oiticica with his Parangolé costumes, and Franz West with the Passstrücke, accessible to visitors, offering a perspective that extends from the Eurocentric context to a global one.
The path also includes two special projects: In the video gallery, Pakghor & Palan, a social kitchen and urban garden by the Bangladeshi collective Britto Arts Trust, activated weekly during the exhibition (info at maxxi.art); In the well, the immersive installation na moita by the Brazilian collective OPAVIVARÁ!, reflecting on the theme of meeting and sharing. In Piazza Alighiero Boetti, Jens Haaning’s audio work Romanian Jokes broadcasts Romanian-language jokes through a speaker, while on the façade of Via Guido Reni, passerby photographed by Braco Dimitrievijc a few days before the opening are featured in his famous series The Casual Passer-by I Met.
