MAXXI opens major Andrea Pazienza exhibition celebrating the enduring force of an Italian icon
Installation view of Andrea Pazienza: Non Sempre Si Muore @ Giorgio e Giulia Benni-courtesy Fondazione MAXXI.
ROME.—
MAXXI has opened a sweeping new exhibition dedicated to Andrea Pazienza, offering visitors one of the most comprehensive museum tributes ever staged to the legendary artist and graphic innovator. Titled Andrea Pazienza. Not Always Do We Die, the show marks the 70th anniversary of Pazienza’s birth and is now on view in Rome.
The exhibition serves as the second chapter of a larger project that began at MAXXI L’Aquila, where an earlier presentation explored Pazienza’s formative years and first creative breakthroughs. In Rome, the story expands into a full portrait of an artist whose influence continues to resonate across comics, illustration, contemporary art, and visual culture.
Few figures in modern Italian culture have left a mark quite like Pazienza. Celebrated for his restless imagination, sharp wit, and extraordinary draftsmanship, he transformed comics into a more experimental and expressive language. His work captured the political tensions, youthful anxieties, and cultural shifts of his era while remaining deeply personal and visually inventive.
At the heart of the exhibition are more than 500 original comic pages, bringing together many of the unforgettable characters that defined his career. Visitors encounter Pentothal, the dreamlike and introspective figure through whom many first discovered Pazienza’s voice, as well as Zanardi, the cynical antihero who became one of the most provocative symbols of 1980s youth culture. Also featured is Pompeo, often regarded as one of the artist’s most intimate and powerful creations.
One of the exhibition’s most anticipated highlights is a monumental mural Pazienza painted live in 1987 during a comics fair in Naples. Created in just three hours, the work stretches roughly eight meters in length and is being presented in a museum setting for the first time after restoration supported by MAXXI. The mural reveals another dimension of Pazienza’s talent, placing him not only among great cartoonists, but among major visual artists of his generation.
Rather than presenting a conventional chronological survey, the exhibition unfolds through themed rooms organized by mood, subject, and color. Sketches, finished drawings, paintings, handwritten notes, poems, private letters, and archival photographs help create a more intimate portrait of the artist behind the mythology.
Film footage, Super 8 recordings, and rare materials further immerse visitors in the creative world that surrounded Pazienza—one shaped by experimentation, collaboration, rebellion, and remarkable energy.
The exhibition’s title comes from words Pazienza spoke shortly before his death in 1988: “Not always do we die.” Decades later, the phrase feels especially fitting. Through this ambitious presentation, MAXXI makes clear that Pazienza’s work remains vividly alive—still challenging, still moving, and still speaking to new generations.
For audiences in Rome and beyond, the exhibition is more than a tribute. It is a reminder that truly original voices never disappear; they simply keep finding new ways to be heard.
