From March 14 to August 23, 2026, Palazzo Strozzi hosts an unmissable exhibition dedicated to the great American artist Mark Rothko. The exhibition explores the evolution of his art, from his early figurative works, in dialogue with Expressionism and Surrealism, to his celebrated abstract canvases of the 1950s and 1960s, while also exploring his connection to the Italian artistic tradition.

The exhibit features an extraordinary selection of works, including large-scale paintings never before exhibited in Italy, from prestigious private collections and international museums such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The exhibition pays homage to a central figure in the history of modern art, whose works create spaces in which color and light invite meditation and introspection, in a constant tension between abstraction and spirituality.
From Palazzo Strozzi, the project then extends to the city of Florence, involving a place particularly dear to the artist: the Museo di San Marco, exploring Rothko's relationship with Italian Renaissance art, and in particular with Fra Angelico's paintings.
Rothko's works are placed in dialogue with the frescoes of Fra Angelico. Among twentieth-century artists, Mark Rothko is undoubtedly the one who most profoundly understood their essence, absorbing and embracing the metaphysical humanism of Fra Giovanni da Fiesole.

Fra Angelico's light painting left a profound mark on Rothko's poetics: in fact, during his three trips to Italy (in 1950, 1959, and 1966), the American artist regularly returned to the Museo di San Marco, forging an intense connection with the fresco cycle of the painter friar, one that had structural and formal consequences for his art.