The 8 best gallery shows in Rome in October 2026

The title is a line of Man Ray’s, and the show sets him beside an American artist born, as Hank Willis Thomas puts it, shortly after Man Ray died. Thomas first met the older artist’s work as a photography student in New York, and what the two share is the idea that a photograph is something made, not taken. Man Ray’s rayographs, solarisations, objects and paintings hang with Thomas’s retroreflective works, in which a second image hidden in the surface appears only under a flash, and with his sculptures of gestures, clasped hands and a raised fist, cut monumental in veined marble.

It is the first time Galleria Continua has shown Thomas, in Rome and in San Gimignano at once. Here it is inside The St. Regis hotel, by Piazza della Repubblica, through December 31.

The exhibition is built like a play. In the first room, Act One, the cast is introduced: the Daphnes, figures with something human about them that Niwa makes of cast pewter and organic materials. In the second, Act Two, they are caught mid-scene on a stage set, dressed in foraged materials that give each a gesture and a mood. Niwa’s sources are Cantonese opera, Kabuki and Shakespeare played in gardens, and the subject is play in every sense: theater, games, and gender as something performed.

This is the first of the month’s shows to close, on October 16, at T293’s new space on Piazza del Catalone, a few minutes from St. Peter’s. It is open from noon, and on Saturday from 3.

For a year Brigitte Niedermair followed one woman, Renate Hirsch Giacomuzzi, through her life in Bolzano, St. Moritz, Venice and Sardinia: a night at La Fenice for The Magic Flute, polo at St. Moritz, a swing at Soprabolzano, an Easter tree in Bolzano. The pictures, made in 2004 and 2005, read like a diary but are composed like tableaux, somewhere between document and staging, by a photographer from Merano who is better known for her fashion work, for Dior among others. Her method, she says, is to make, wait and see.

Curated by Paola Ugolini, the show opens on Tuesday, October 6, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm, and runs to December 18 on Via Margutta. The gallery is open Tuesday to Friday; Saturday is by appointment.

Fools and babies have one thing in common: they stand outside authority, and may say what no one else can. Eva Beresin’s paintings and sculptures of the last year take that license for themselves, with stretched, Mannerist bodies in loose oil and acrylic and titles to match, Too sweet to trust and How did the fool become stupid? among them. The largest work is a canvas hung like a tapestry that shows the Palazzo dei Pupazzi, the sixteenth-century palace the gallery occupies, with the smaller paintings as views into its rooms.

It is the painter’s second show with Amanita, the New York gallery that opened in Rome a year ago. On Via dei Banchi Vecchi through November 13, open from noon.

Kronenberg has shown with z2o for more than ten years, and this is his fourth solo exhibition there. The sculptures are assembled from things that had other lives, metal, plastic, granite, wood and organic matter, joined so that each loses its use and becomes hard to name. The drawings, which have grown freer and less tied to resemblance, are the subject of a new monograph, with essays by Cecilia Canziani, Antonio Grulli and Alessandro Rabottini, to be presented during the show.

Through October 31 at the gallery’s space in Testaccio. Luca Moscariello’s Quasi ombra, trompe-l’œil paintings of wood grain and shadow, is at z2o Project, a short walk away in San Saba, until November 22.

Monitor has galleries in Rome, in Lisbon and in a village in Abruzzo, and this exhibition pairs an artist from its Italian side with one from its Portuguese side, both in their twenties. Satya Forte, born in Atri in 2000, makes photographs, sculptures and drawings with hair, under titles such as Alba Luce and Miniature di paesaggio. Pedro Zhang, born in Évora in 2001, paints small nocturnal pictures out of childhood imagery and the natural world; his first gallery show was in Lisbon this spring.

In San Lorenzo, facing Piazza dell’Immacolata, through November 13. The gallery opens at 2 pm, Tuesday to Friday, which makes it a good stop before Gilda Lavia and the Pastificio Cerere, both a few streets away.

Andrés Anza, the Mexican ceramicist who won the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2024, makes sculptures that could be coral, cactus or something seen under a microscope. His second show at Anna Marra comes out of the Cerro de la Silla, the mountain that stands over his city, Monterrey. The new sculptures sit between the microscope and the telescope, drawing on microbiology, invented botany and star maps, and for the first time he uses dense, glossy glazes, from deep blues to saturated earths, so that the gallery reads as a single habitat.

In the Ghetto, beside the Portico d’Ottavia, through November 21, with a text by Marina Dacci. The gallery is open on weekday afternoons and on Saturday morning.

What game are we playing? The group show curated by Anna Simone asks what art can still do when serious things, war, power, the land, are turned into games and everything arrives through a screen: whether it can resist, or simply becomes one more product. Eleven artists answer in ceramics, textiles, acrylic paintings and installations, on dystopian futures, neocolonialism, patriarchy and the language of war; among them are Elena Bellantoni, Pamela Diamante, Leonardo Petrucci and Lucia Marcucci.

At Galleria Gilda Lavia, which opened in San Lorenzo in 2018, through November 14. Open Tuesday to Saturday from 2 to 7.