Within the framework of the new Nivola vis-à-vis programme, conceived to bring Costantino Nivola (1911-1988) into dialogue with key figures in the art world of his time, Museo Nivola presents Nivola, Colombo and the Space Around, on view from 24 July to 25 October 2026.
Curated by Chiara Gatti and Anna Pirisi, in collaboration with the Gianni Colombo Archive in Milan, the exhibition is the core of ROOMS, the first chapter in a three-act narrative conceived by Chiara Gatti, Artistic Director of Museo Nivola, for the Museum’s summer-autumn 2026 exhibition programme.
Developed across three rooms, three environments, three places to traverse and experience, the exhibition explores the theme of space and the experimental language of the environment as a site of relationships between our bodies and the inhabitable dimension that receives us: its perspectives, volumes, voids and light.
Here, then, are Nivola’s Room of Dreams, Gianni Colombo’s Elastic Space, and the Room of Memory, created to activate collective remembrance. This narrative unfolds in three phases, in tripartite rooms, like the rhythmic units of ancient songs. Beginning with shared memory, it develops into a broader reflection on the ways in which we inhabit and perceive space. The audience’s sensory experience comes into contact with the artists’ research and, at the same time, with the space that houses it.
The project’s scholarly rationale stems from a significant coincidence of dates. Costantino Nivola’s first environmental study dates from 1968: Model for the Monument to Antonio Gramsci, made in the same year that Gianni Colombo exhibited his Elastic Space at the Venice Biennale.
Thinking of space in terms of traversal was precisely what Nivola did in the 1960s with his horizontal monuments, such as the project for Piazza Satta. Here affinities between the two masters emerge in the construction and trajectories of light that gives form to space. “A light entering through the window / to dissolve the persistent darkness / of my temple and prison of intimacy / and my waking dreams,” as Nivola put it. In Nivola’s aesthetic investigation, the room becomes a primary measure of space: not merely an architectural setting, but a place built around our presence. Inhabited space thus becomes the essential core of his exploration, a volume designed to welcome, define and place humankind in relation to its surroundings. This idea runs throughout his work, in which architecture, sculpture and everyday life merge in a deeply human vision of space, later materialising in the “little theatres,” based on modular forms and mathematical and proportional relations. Beneath this lies a subtle evocative tension, capable of calling forth an enigmatic, contemplative sphere. The “dream boxes,” the little theatres, explore our descent into an interior – into the perspective that swallows us up – as silent actors in a scriptless performance, suspended in a time in which becoming reveals itself through the shifting of light.
Colombo’s thinking likewise opens onto the theme of experience. “I thought I would work more on the conditions of balance, sensation and the spectator’s relationship to space,” he said, “rather than giving form to a complex visual spectacle with a scenographic character […]. I was seeking the possibility of incorporating this type of sensation into a work to be experienced as an emotional factor and an expressive fact.” (Gianni Colombo, typescript, 1964/65). The full-scale reconstruction of the Room of Dreams, in dialogue with Colombo’s Elastic Space, creates a succession of perceptual experiences – between disorientation, shifting coordinates and illusory vanishing points.
With respect to these works, the third room is designed to welcome collective memory through an act of active citizenship, transforming space from a neutral container into a place for thinking, a device for gathering memories through different languages, voices, gazes, writing and images: a minimal but crucial gesture in the formation of an archive that will, in every sense, be preserved by the museum. The Lavatoio becomes a place of encounter and exchange, where memory, art and community come together in a new shared experience.
Side event
Tribute to Grazia Deledda
Museum, 24 July – 20 September
A century after the Nobel Prize was awarded to Grazia Deledda, Museo Nivola will display, in the permanent collection galleries, the bronze sculpture made by Costantino Nivola in the mid-1970s in tribute to the great writer from Nuoro. On loan from Banco di Sardegna, the work will be shown alongside the summer exhibition in the new skylight space.
Nivola vis-à-vis
Curated by Chiara Gatti
Chapter One: ROOMS
Nivola, Colombo and the Space Around
Lavatoio, 24 July – 25 October 2026
Curated by Chiara Gatti and Anna Pirisi, in collaboration with the Gianni Colombo Archive in Milan
Side event
Tribute to Grazia Deledda
Museum, 24 July – 20 September 2026
Institutional Sponsors
Autonomous Region of Sardinia, Municipality of Orani, Province of Nuoro
Principal Supporter
Fondazione di Sardegna
Special Thanks
Gianni Colombo Archive
Vittoria Soddu
Proloco Orani
Winery Autori del Vino
Exhibition Installation
Artigianato & Design di Pietro Fois
Graphic design
Leonardo Sonnoli
Painting
Bioazione di Fabio Milia
Museo Nivola
Via Gonare 2, 08026 Orani (Nu)
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Graphic project Leonardo Sonnoli Studio
Foto: Gianni Colombo, foto di Oliviero Toscani © Archivio Gianni Colombo, Milano
