Germinazioni, curated by Mattia Lapperier at Galleria Studio Cenacchi in Bologna, brings the work of Filippo Maestroni and Paolo Migliazza into dialogue through a shared exploration of resilience, matter as a field of forces, and life’s inexorable drive to persist in the face of the adversities of our time. Inspired by the sculptural legacy of Carlo Zauli, and particularly by the dramatic tension that characterises his work of the 1980s, the exhibition develops around a formal and conceptual analogy: the parallel between the growth of spontaneous vegetation in hostile environments and puberty as a threshold in human development.

The opening on Thursday 24 September at 6 pm will feature a sound intervention by Alceste Neri.

A few minutes’ walk from the gallery, Studio La Linea Verticale will simultaneously open a three-person exhibition featuring works by Filippo Maestroni from a different phase of his practice.

The two exhibitions will open at the same time.

Filippo Maestroni presents a series of works in which the tenacious vegetation of the Romagna badlands bursts from massive refractory foundry crucibles. Industrial vessels designed to withstand extreme temperatures and forge metals are transformed from places of constraint into matrices for an unexpected surge of life.

Paolo Migliazza, meanwhile, explores the formative years of human development. His sculptures in clay, shaped and marked by interventions in wax and charcoal, embody the fragile beauty of adolescence: that liminal age when childhood shatters, fire smoulders beneath the ashes and the human being still holds on to the fragile hope of becoming anything.

The two artists’ practices converge most powerfully in works where Maestroni transforms the refractory crucible into one of the faces modelled by Migliazza. The head itself becomes an alchemical vessel, a crucible of impulses, suggesting that the biological and existential drive towards life springs simultaneously from the earth and from human thought.

Germinazioni thus becomes an uncompromising affirmation of life that refuses to surrender: a determined reminder that even through the driest of cracks, the earth will always find the strength to bloom.

Filippo Maestroni
Paolo Migliazza
Germinazioni
Curated by Mattia Lapperier
24.09.2026 > 17.10.2025

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
tuesday-saturday: 4:30-7.30pm
monday: on appointment
sunday: closed
extraordinary closure: october 8-9-10