ROME.- A major exhibition dedicated to Diego Rivera and the rise of modern Mexican art has opened at the Capitoline Museums – Villa Caffarelli, offering visitors a vivid journey through the colors, politics and cultural imagination of 20th-century Mexico.

Titled Diego Rivera and the Construction of Modern Art in Mexico in the 20th Century, the exhibition runs through December 13, 2026, and brings together more than 140 works, including 30 by Rivera, the celebrated Mexican painter and muralist whose art helped shape a new visual language for modern Mexico.

Presented alongside Rivera’s works are pieces by some of the most important figures in Mexican art, including Frida Kahlo, José María Velasco, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, María Izquierdo, Rufino Tamayo, Dr. Atl, Saturnino Herrán and others. The exhibition also includes videos and photographs, among them images of Rivera taken by Tina Modotti.

The show places Rivera at the center of a broader story: the creation of a modern Mexican identity through art. Rather than presenting him as an isolated genius, the exhibition traces the artistic networks, historical tensions and cultural movements that shaped his vision and that of his contemporaries.

The exhibition begins with the roots of Mexican modernity in the 19th century, following the birth of independent Mexico in 1821. At that moment, the country began searching for a cultural identity capable of representing a new, diverse and rapidly changing nation. Art became one of the most powerful tools for imagining that identity, combining tradition, modernity and a growing awareness of social transformation.

During the first half of the 20th century, Mexican artists developed a national visual language that drew on pre-Columbian heritage, popular culture and the social demands that followed the Mexican Revolution. This process found one of its most influential expressions in Mexican Muralism.

Promoted in 1921 by José Vasconcelos and developed by artists such as Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera, Muralism helped bring art out of elite spaces and into public life. Its monumental images turned workers, peasants and Indigenous communities into central figures in the story of Mexico, reshaping the social role of the artist and making art a tool of civic education and collective memory.

The exhibition is organized into four thematic sections. “Academy and Tradition” explores Rivera’s training and his relationship with 19th-century artistic heritage. “Diego Rivera and Mexico’s Contribution to the European Avant-Gardes” focuses on his European years and his dialogue with Cubism and other avant-garde movements. “The Mexican Cultural Renaissance” looks at the post-revolutionary period, when visual art, literature, architecture and music came together to define a modern national identity. The final section, “Beyond Social Realism,” examines how Mexican modern art expanded beyond the language of Muralism into new forms of experimentation.

The show is curated by Miguel Fernández Félix, director of the Museo Kaluz in Mexico City, and Alberto González Torres, director of the Museo Robert Brady. It is promoted by Roma Capitale, the Capitoline Superintendency for Cultural Heritage, and produced in collaboration with MetaMorfosi Eventi and Museo Kaluz, with the support of Zètema Progetto Cultura and the patronage of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura and the Embassy of Mexico in Italy.

Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri said the exhibition captures a period when art became a means of civic reconstruction, popular emancipation and collective reflection after the Mexican Revolution. He noted that visitors will be able to recognize in the works a feeling of renewal and liberation that continues to resonate today.

Massimiliano Smeriglio, Rome’s Councillor for Culture, emphasized Rivera’s decision to return art to its public, civil and educational function. Through Muralism, he said, Rivera transformed civic buildings and workplaces into visual narratives of post-revolutionary Mexico, creating art that spoke of labor, Indigenous communities, social rights, dignity and access to education.

For Pietro Folena, president of MetaMorfosi Eventi, the history of modern Mexican art offers “an extraordinary lesson in freedom.” The artists featured in the exhibition, he said, did not choose between tradition and innovation, roots and openness, identity and cosmopolitanism. Instead, they inhabited that creative tension and turned it into a source of cultural energy.

With its sweeping selection of paintings, documents and images, the exhibition presents Rivera not only as Mexico’s most famous muralist, but as part of a larger artistic movement that changed how a nation saw itself — and how the world saw Mexican modern art.