The Fondazione Merz presents the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, an exhibition project curated by Claudia Gioia and Beatrice Merz.

The exhibition’s intent is to explores art’s ability to respond to current and urgent issues and to be a catalyst for change, rejecting resignation to immobility. It brings together 20 artists from different generations and backgrounds who make the overcoming and transformation of imposed and supposed limits their artistic grammar.

The exhibition is open from Monday 27 October 2025 to Sunday 1 February 2026.

In renaming the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, the phrase by Mario Merz — “culture strips to reveal war” — was added. The reference is to the ever-complex role of culture in situations of conflict and the need for culture to shed its quiet image in order to highlight its combative nature. Here we also emphasise the freedom and responsibility of art and culture, as well as the goal of pushing boundaries, especially today when all the principles of coexistence and law are constantly being overturned, so that new words can emerge to start, thinking again in terms of justice and international, social and civil relations.

The exhibition brings together actions, images and voices capable of realigning means and ends, with the awareness that ‘relationality’ is, as Barbara Kruger recalled in the first edition of the project, a constitutive quality of action. In this perspective – also dear to Hannah Arendt, for whom collective action has an aesthetic principle – freedom and execution coincide in giving shape to new words and forms in response to the crises of the present.