ROME.- MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts presents Frame Time Open, the most comprehensive solo exhibition ever held in Italy dedicated to Rosa Barba (Agrigento, 1972), one of the country’s most internationally acclaimed and influential contemporary artists.

Curated by Francesco Stocchi, the exhibition highlights over twenty years of the artist’s research through a selection of her most significant sculptural works and films, including two new productions created specifically for this project and premiering at MAXXI.

With Frame Time Open - developed in close collaboration with the artist, who also conceived the exhibition design - MAXXI’s spaces transform into an architectural notation of rhythmic interconnections through, film, language, sound and light. Maria Emanuela Bruni, President of Fondazione MAXXI: «MAXXI was conceived as an observatory of the present, a place where contemporary languages intersect with cultural legacies and future visions. Rosa Barba’s work exemplifies this mission: drawing on the cinematic tradition, her creations become true architectures of moving light, capable of investigating time, memory and reality».

Francesco Stocchi, MAXXI Artistic Director and exhibition curator: «Frame Time Open reflects the visionary scope of Rosa Barba’s research, transforming MAXXI into a dynamic landscape where cinema, sculpture, and light redefine our perception of time. Through a journey that stages more than twenty years of her practice, the exhibition celebrates one of the most original voices in contemporary art, offering visitors a unique experience that weaves together formal innovation and conceptual depth».

Rosa Barba’s research, positioned between cinema, literature, and science, explores time as both a physical and conceptual material.

The exhibition at MAXXI offers a comprehensive overview of her continuously evolving artistic methodology and reaffirms her position as a pioneering figure in contemporary visual art, celebrating her distinctive approach to time – in her words: «considered as an accumulation of events rather than a linear progression - and to cinema as a spatial and temporal dimension».

The exhibition layout, designed by Barba in response to Zaha Hadid’s spaces, is conceived as a three-dimensional score, an artwork-display on intervowen tracks which extends like a drawing across Galleria 2 and responds sensitively to the architecture, making the exhibition a unique and site-specific experience.

A large steel and plexiglass framework presents 24 works created between 2009 and 2025, arranged along an open route with three distinct access points.

Cinematic elements become autonomous fragments that also emphasize the interdependency of each. Time unfolds in a circular flow of light, rhythm, and transparency, while sound amplifies the exhibition’s synesthetic dimension.

In the exhibition, works such as As Fixed in Flux (2025) and Solar Flux Recordings (2022),) reveal time as a sculptural material; while Stating the Real Sublime (2009) and A Shark Well Governed (2017) play with conceptual ideas.

Color Clocks (2012) and Color Studies (2013) explore color as a measure of perception; Hear, There, Where the Echoes Are (2016/2025) activates the whole exhibition through sound interferences and Off Splintered Time (2021) transforms film into continuous movement.

At the heart of the project are two new productions.

Myth and Mercury (2025) is a new 35mm film co-commissioned by MAXXI and CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian and co-produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and Hamburger Kunsthalle. Starting from the Gramsci’s prison diaries, Barba explores the Mediterranean as a blueprint of transformation, alongside the inner working of the entangled energies that are visible and invisible to us.

They Are Taking All My Letters (2025) is a kinetic sculpture composed of steel, acrylic, aluminium, LEDs, motors, and 34 vertical strips of 70mm celluloid film in constant motion, printed with white text on a black background drawn from writings by Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and the artist herself. The continuously shifting phrases generate ever- new linguistic combinations, reflecting on time, intermittent light, and the translation of language into image.

The exhibition at MAXXI inaugurates an international project that will unfold in a new site specific exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (May 2026).