Group SHOW • ATTO 3/3: NELLO SPAZIO

BIGAIGNON x RHINOCEROS, ROME, ITALY
OPENING: SUNDAY 18 JANUARY 2026 (3-6PM)
EXHIBITION FROM 18 JANUARY TO 15 MARCH 2026

Artists: Mary-Ellen Bartley, Renato D’Agostin, Vittoria Gerardi, Yannig Hedel, Bernard Joubert, François Kenesi, Denis Malartre, Jean de Pomereu, Olivier Ratsi, Marco Tagliafico, Thierry Urbain, Elyn Zimmerman

We are pleased to announce the third and final exhibition of its cycle presented in Rome in partnership with Rhinoceros — a manifesto-like venue imagined by Alda Fendi and designed by Jean Nouvel, where architecture itself becomes a sensory experience. Entitled Atto 3/3: Nello Spazio, this exhibition concludes a triptych devoted to the three fundamental elements of photography: light, time, and finally space. Following Sotto la Luce and Col Tempo, this final act explores the spatial dimension as the primary condition of all images, but also as a sensitive, mental, and political material.

Space is never neutral. It is what we move through, what contains us as much as what we project onto it. In photography, space is framed, fragmented, reconstructed; it becomes surface, volume, depth, illusion. From Renaissance perspective to contemporary experimentation, space has been a field of tension between the real and the imaginary, between the visible and the invisible. In Rome, a city shaped by stratification, space becomes embodied memory: an accumulation of voids and solids, of ruins and constructions, of mental projections as much as physical realities.

The artists brought together in Atto 3/3: Nello Spazio examine this notion through multiple approaches, ranging from architecture to archaeology, from extreme landscapes to inner spaces, from photography to sculpture, from the flat image to tridimensional form. Together, they propose a journey in which space is no longer merely represented, but activated, displaced, and sometimes even disrupted.

Through her work on Pompeii, Vittoria Gerardi explores a space frozen by catastrophe, suspended between disappearance and preservation. Her plaster-veiled photographs, combined with minimalist and enigmatic sculptures, evoke a buried space in which the image becomes both relic and reconstruction — a fragile imprint of a place forever transformed by time and matter.
Jean de Pomereu creates new topographies that echo the human transformation of terrestrial environments, drawing on archival photographs taken in Antarctica by the U.S. military during the Cold War, extreme, ideologically charged landscapes. He pairs these with a sculpture in homage to Carl Andre. Here, space is both geopolitical and conceptual: a site of strategic projection as much as a field of minimal abstraction.
The pseudo-imaginary landscapes of Marco Tagliafico, constructed in particular through the association of digital images and analogue prints, blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. These almost sculptural photographic volumes invent mental spaces in which perception wavers, revealing photography as a tool for spatial fabrication.
With his installation combining photography and sculptural volumes derived from urban architecture, Yannig Hedel questions the city as a formal matrix. Urban space is fragmented, reconstructed, and transformed into a physical experience in which the image leaves the plane to become object.
A historical installation from the 1970s, along with a drawing on mylar paper by Elyn Zimmerman, recalls how space, for her, is above all a light-based and perceptual experience. Her work, deeply connected to their material resonances, situates the artwork in a direct relationship with its environment.
Through her homage to Giorgio Morandi, Mary-Ellen Bartley unfolds an intimate, almost silent space in which photography becomes a site of contemplation. Space is reduced and concentrated, yet remarkably intense, revealing the depth contained within the simplest things.
Renato D’Agostin offers a monumental and radical vision of Venice with his project Veni Etiam. His prints of Venetian canals, combined with his emblematic Briccole sculptures, transform the space of the City of Doges into a graphic and sculptural abstraction, where the city becomes rhythm, line, and matter.
A former resident of the Villa Medici, Thierry Urbain presents his imaginary architectures — mental and poetic spaces oscillating between ruin and construction. These nonexistent yet familiar places question our relationship to utopia, memory, and projection.
The ribbon works from the 1970s by Bernard Joubert introduce a geometric and performative space, in which art unfolds between the wall that supports it and the mind of the viewer who completes the form envisioned by the artist, breaking with the traditional frontal relationship of painting.
Finally, Denis Malartre, Olivier Ratsi and François Kenesi disrupt our perception of a given space. Through devices that unsettle the gaze and destabilize spatial references, they question space as a mental construction — fragile and reversible.

In parallel, since last September and continuing through March 2026, Bigaignon has occupied a space on the first floor of this historic building with a major installation by Olivier Ratsi. A true synthesis of the three exhibitions planned at Rhinoceros, this immersive work brings together the three themes that the French gallery seeks to explore during its residency in Rome: light, time, and space.

At a time when images circulate without depth, Atto 3/3: Nello Spazio proposes the opposite experience: slowing down, inhabiting forms, and physically engaging with space. For if the works presented are light and time, they are also, fundamentally, ways of thinking about and living within space. Perhaps it is here, ultimately, that our capacity to remain present in the world is at stake.