Massimilliano Gioni

Massimiliano Gioni is the Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum and the director of the Trussardi Foundation in Milan.

He has curated numerous international exhibitions and biennials including the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2010), the 1st New Museum Triennial (co-curated with Lauren Cornell and Laura Hoptman in 2009), the 4th Berlin Biennale (co-curated with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick in 2006) and Manifesta 5 (co-curated with Marta Kuzma in 2004).

At the New Museum Massimiliano Gioni has curated solo exhibitions by Ed Atkins, John Akomfrah, Pawel Althamer, Thomas Bayrle, Lynda Benglis, Paul Chan, Sarah Charlesworth, Roberto Cuoghi, Tacita Dean, Nicole Eisenman, Urs Fischer, Hans Haacke, Camille Henrot, Carsten Höller, Kahlil Joseph, Ragnar Kjartansson, Klara Liden, Sarah Lucas, Goshka Macuga, Gustav Metzger, Marta Minujin, Albert Oehlen, Chris Ofili, Carol Rama, Pipilotti Rist, Peter Saul, Jim Shaw, Andra Ursuta, Anri Sala, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Nari Ward, among others. 

Gioni’s group shows – which include After Nature, Ghosts in the Machine, Here and Elsewhere, NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, Ostalgia and The Keeper – have become signature initiatives of the New Museum program. In 2021, Gioni has served as part of the curatorial advisory group – composed of Naomi Beckwith, Glenn Ligon and Mark Nash – which supervised the posthumous realization of Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, which had been originally conceived by Enwezor for the New Museum. In 2019 Gioni curated The Warmth of Other Suns. Stories of Global Displacement, a collaboration between the New Museum and the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, and at Museo Jumex in Mexico City he curated Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even, the first exhibition to bring in dialogue the works of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons – with nearly 500,000 viewers, the exhibition was the most visited in the museum's history. In 2018 in London at The Store X Gioni organized Strange Days – Memories of the Future, an exhibition-anthology of video works originally presented at the New Museum. 

Since 2003 Gioni has been directing the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan, where he has curated solo shows and public art projects by, among others, Allora and Calzadilla, Paweł Althamer, Darren Almond, John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Elmgreen and Dragset, Urs Fischer, Fischli and Weiss, Cyprien Gaillard, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Ibrahim Mahama, Paola Pivi, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, and Tino Sehgal. With the Trussardi Foundation, in 2015, on the occasion of Expo Milan, he curated The Great Mother at Palazzo Reale, and in 2017 he has organized The Restless Earth at La Triennale. In 2017 he curated the exhibition Giuseppe Penone: Matrice, produced by Fendi at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome. 

Gioni was also part of the commission of the Ministry of Culture that selected Giuseppe Penone's Leaves of Stone to be the first contemporary artwork to be permanently installed in the historic center of the city of Rome. Since 2015 he has organized the presentations of the Tony and Elham Salame Collection at the Aishti Foundation in Beirut, where he has curated three exhibitions, titled respectively New Skin (2015), Good Dreams, Bad Dreams: American Mythologies (2016), and The Trick Brain (2017) along with Urs Fischer's major solo exhibition in the Middle East: The Lyrical and the Prosaic (2019). He is currently at work on Jeff Koons’s major solo exhibition Lost in America which will open in Doha, Qatar, in November 2021. He is curating George Condo’s The Picture Gallery, the artist’s first major exhibition in Asia, which will inaugurate in September 2021 at the Long Museum in Shanghai, and he has organized The Greek Gift, a small collective exhibition for the Dakis Joannou/Deste Foundation’s Slaughterhouse in Hydra which opened in June 2021. 

Gioni has contributed to many publications and magazines including Artforum, Flash Art (for which he served as US editor from 1999 to 2003), Frieze, Parkett, Tate Etc., among others. He co-founded the Wrong Gallery with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, with whom he has directed the independent art magazines The Wrong Times and Charley. He is the commissioning editor of 2000 Words, a series of monographic books published by the Dakis Joannou Collection/Deste Foundation, with which he has frequently collaborated, co-curating numerous exhibitions in Athens. 

He has served as a juror for the following prizes and awards: Absolut Art Award, BMW Art Journey, Hugo Boss Prize, Mario Merz Prize, Edvard Munch Art Award, Pinchuk Art Prize, Preis der Nationalgalerie-Hamburger Banhof, Kurt Schwitters Prize, Vilcek Prize.