Benni Bosetto “Rebecca”

From February 12 to July 19, 2026, Pirelli HangarBicocca presents Rebecca, the first solo exhibition by Benni Bosetto in a museum. Conceived as an environment to be inhabited, the works transform the museum into a domestic and imaginative space, where lightness, rest, and pleasure take on a critical dimension. The exhibition unfolds as a “sensorial manifesto” reflecting on some of the most urgent tensions of the present—between freedom and control, self-determination and constraint, productivity and desire—affirming daydreaming as a form of resistance.

"The exhibition is an invitation to reclaim public and museum spaces as places to dream. Daydreaming becomes a collective exercise in imagining a desirable future based not on productivity, but on sensitivity, emotion, and transformation", explains Benni Bosetto.

Benni Bosetto (born in Merate in 1987; currently lives and works in Milan) explores the human experience and questions of identity through drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance, focusing on the physicality of bodies. Her work builds an intimate, layered imaginary world in which individuals, organisms, and animal species coexist and contaminate one another. Understood as an active tool for relating to the world, the body is central to Bosetto’s practice. Desire, sexuality, presence, and vulnerability emerge as fields of inquiry, cultivating what the artist defines as a “form of resistance” to the ways the body is conventionally conceived. Bosetto manipulates, edits, and layers sources ranging from literature and anthropology to popular culture, cinema, psychoanalysis, and art to create surreal, dreamlike representations. Through the construction of hyper-narratives, the artist shapes a potentially infinite poetic discourse in which each piece emerges from the convergence of multiple origins and imaginaries. During the initial phase of her creative process, she collects visual, textual, autobiographical, and iconographic materials in an almost compulsive manner. These materials are then layered and transformed to generate new images. Fascinated by the codes of staging and their transformative potential, she creates mutable environments that give rise to an immersive experience for viewers, where different temporal dimensions and perspectives intertwine and coexist.

Bosetto earned a degree in painting and a postgraduate specialization in sculpture from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, and expanded her international experience by studying at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She first approached artistic expression through classical dance. Since childhood, ballet has instilled in her an exactness in her movements and an awareness of her body as an expressive tool. Bosetto is a distinctive voice of her generation because of her radical use of drawing as an expanded practice and her view of art as a total experience that blends gesture, matter, and ritual while remaining deeply rooted in the manual and physical nature of artistic creation through sculpture and performance. Her relevance in the contemporary Italian art scene stems from her ability to blend her own interpretation of the present with an open dialogue with artists and imagery from recent art history. Her work reveals affinities with the unsettling sensuality of Louise Bourgeois, the ritual physicality of Ana Mendieta, the material instability of Eva Hesse, the visionary freedom of Carol Rama, and the poetic and performative tension of Rebecca Horn. Within this resonance, Bosetto develops a language in which the body is both living matter and a symbolic device, an unstable threshold between surface and depth. Rejecting any conceptual fixedness, her work embraces an experiential, intimate, and spiritual dimension in which lightness becomes a political and emotional act—a process of unveiling where drawing, sculpture, and space converge into a unified sensory narrative.

Curated by Fiammetta Griccioli, Rebecca is the Italian artist's first major institutional exhibition. The title is inspired by the 1938 novel of the same name by English writer and playwright Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989). In the novel, the real protagonist is a house that preserves the memory of a deceased woman named Rebecca, who lived there. The house in the novel, just like the display at Pirelli HangarBicocca, becomes a true architectural female body, a living organism. The name Rebecca, whose etymology refers to "bond" or "union", alludes to welcoming, gathering, and retaining – acts that are central to Bosetto's poetics of merging the body and environment in an intimate, continuous relationship.

The exhibition project transforms the Shed space by evoking a domestic and welcoming environment, where rooms, walls, and surfaces seem to come alive, giving the space a private and inhabited dimension. It is both a place and a statement: at an historical moment when everything is dominated by production speed, Bosetto invites us to reclaim our subjective time, a time for dreaming, resting, and regaining our imagination. The show becomes at once an intimate place and a political act. Visitors are welcomed into a dreamlike landscape where every element evokes the desire to imagine, and where erotic and pleasure-related signs form the backdrop to a refuge in which everyone can rediscover themselves, free from social conditioning. Another key element of Bosetto's artistic practice is the physical creation of her work through long hours of manual labor. Each drawing is created by hand by the artist over the course of several months. Every ornament, every decoration devoid of functional purpose within the domestic space, takes on symbolic value. Ultimately, her entire artistic practice aims to achieve one outcome: providing shelter from the urgency and pressure of linear time. Here, visitors can daydream and have the freedom to imagine and affirm their present and future.

The artist

Some of the institutions and independent spaces that have hosted solo exhibitions by Benni Bosetto include the following: Museo della Marineria Washington Patrignani, Pesaro; Spazio Lima, Milan (2024); Villa di Geggiano, Emanuela Campoli, Siena; MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2022); Almanac Inn, Turin (2020); Kunstraum, London (2019); Fonderia Battaglia, Milan (2018); Convento de los Domenicos, Eivissa, Spain (2017); Tile Project Space, Milan (2016).

Her work and performances have been presented in various group exhibitions, including: Madre - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin (2024); MAXXI - Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome (2023); GAMeC - Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo (2022); MART - Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento (2021); Quadriennale d'Arte, Rome (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene (2020); Villa Medici, Rome (2019); OGR - Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Turin (2018); MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna (2018); Baruchello Foundation, Rome (2018); FutureDome, Milan (2017).