Palazzo Strozzi will present an exhibition of works by Mark Rothko from March 14 through August 23, 2026, bringing together paintings that have never been seen in Italy. The show draws from private collections and major museums, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It represents one of the most comprehensive examinations of Rothko’s work to be staged in Europe in recent years.
Curated by Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, and Elena Geuna, the exhibition traces the painter’s evolution from his early figurative works through to the large, contemplative canvases that defined his mature style. The early paintings reveal a restless engagement with Expressionism and Surrealism, a search for forms that could contain emotional and philosophical weight. By the nineteen-fifties, Rothko had arrived at the language he would refine for the rest of his life: fields of color that seem to breathe, edges that blur and dissolve, surfaces that invite prolonged looking. These are paintings that demand time and quiet. They ask viewers to enter into a kind of dialogue with light itself.
What makes this exhibition particularly compelling is its attention to Rothko’s relationship with Italian art. He visited Italy several times, and the experience left a profound mark on his thinking. He admired the frescoes of Fra Angelico and the architectural spaces of the Renaissance, seeing in them a quality he sought in his own work: the ability to create environments that shaped human experience, that turned viewing into something closer to meditation or prayer. The curators have taken this connection seriously, structuring the show to illuminate these affinities without overstating them.
The exhibition spills beyond Palazzo Strozzi into two sites that held special meaning for Rothko. At the Museo di San Marco, his canvases will hang near the frescoes of Fra Angelico, whose use of color and handling of sacred space Rothko studied closely. The juxtaposition is deliberate, an attempt to show how a twentieth-century abstractionist and a fifteenth-century monk-painter might be working toward similar ends. At the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, in the vestibule designed by Michelangelo, another selection of Rothko’s paintings will be installed. The space itself is austere and monumental, and placing Rothko’s work there underscores his affinity for architecture that heightens feeling, that makes room for introspection.
This is not the first time Rothko’s paintings have been shown in conversation with older art, but Florence offers a particularly resonant context. The city’s artistic heritage, its long tradition of thinking about color, light, and spiritual experience, provides a natural backdrop for work that often feels less like painting and more like atmosphere, less like representation and more like presence.
The exhibition is organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, in collaboration with the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. It is supported by the Municipality of Florence, Regione Toscana, the Metropolitan City of Florence, the Florence Chamber of Commerce, Fondazione CR Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, and the Committee of Partners of Palazzo Strozzi. For those who make the trip, it promises to be one of the more thoughtful encounters with Rothko’s work in recent memory, a chance to see his paintings not as objects to be admired from a distance but as spaces to be inhabited, however briefly.
