Carlo Benvenuto

Karol

May 16th, 2026 - July 30th, 2026
Karol | Carlo Benvenuto
Galleria Mazzoli // Via Nazario Sauro n.62, Modena

Carlo Benvenuto was born in Stresa in 1966. He has been exhibited in Italy and abroad in galleries and public and private institutions. Major solo exhibitions have been dedicated to him at Italy’s most important museums of contemporary art: the Mart in Rovereto in 2020, the Gamec in Bergamo in 2016, and the Macro in Rome in 2003. His works have been exhibited at major international art institutions, including: Palazzo Reale in Milan (2026), the MAXXI in Rome (2021), the Triennale di Milano (2010), and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (2006).
The centrality of his artistic practice is confirmed by his presence in Italy’s leading public collections, including those of the MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome; the MAMBO, Museum of Modern Art in Bologna; the GAM, Gallery of Modern Art in Turin; the GAMEC, Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bergamo; and the MAXXI, National Museum of 21st-Century Arts in Rome.
He has participated in projects with the Nicola Trussardi Foundation on several occasions.
He has been working with the Mazzoli Gallery continuously since 1999.

PRESS RELEASE

”In Karol, there is a sense of an ancient, ancestral core that has endured and resurfaces.”
Carlo Benvenuto

Galleria Mazzoli is pleased to announce Carlo Benvenuto’s exhibition, Karol.
On view, in addition to photographic works, are newly created sculptures and paintings. Benvenuto stages a motionless dance that simultaneously reveals and preserves the artist’s poetic spirit. Everyday objects are captured by his view camera at a 1:1 scale—still, precise, and perfectly in focus. In the rigor of the spaces and the softness of the light, we find a quest for abstraction, for metaphysical and surrealist dreams; it is the artist’s self-portrait, yet without his physical presence: he projects himself like a transparent shadow throughout all his works—invisible yet perfectly recognizable.
Benvenuto, who has always distanced himself from the label of “photographer” in his photographic work, is exceptionally presenting oil and enamel paintings. These are canvases of either very small or extremely large dimensions, never medium-sized, as if painting could be either a private experience or a majestic proclamation. Space is nullified by bold strokes, with the refinement of surfaces and colors, where calm and concentration reign: a prayer, a continuous meditation that runs through the exhibition.
In Karol’s exhibition, alongside these works, we discover bronzes in which images take shape as if plucked from dreams; fingers have torn fragments from an immaterial thought and hold them within the material so they may remain and be transformed: a tray that becomes an altar.
“I am ‘the artist of the day after,’ the one who gathers what is and carefully arranges it in a world that has run out of words,” writes Carlo Benvenuto.
This exhibition brings to light the artist’s ancestral connection to classical disciplines such as sculpture and painting, within a novel and circular expressive dimension, where the gesture reveals new paths toward obsessively pursuing the same goal: the origin of wonder.

Catalog available with an essay by Chiara Ianeselli.