Sophie Calle. Matrimoni, Rotture e Funerali inclusi

Curated by Simona Antonacci, the exhibition on display in Gallery 2 at MAXXI is dedicated to one of the most original and influential figures in international contemporary art – the French conceptual artist, photographer and filmmaker Sophie Calle.

Born in Paris in 1953, Sophie Calle has explored the boundaries between private and public life, reality and fiction, art and lived experience since the late 1970s, whilst investigating the major themes of existence: love and separation, mourning and memory, desire and absence, failure and the possibility of starting afresh. The exhibition at MAXXI, the most comprehensive solo retrospective ever staged in Italy, brings together eight of her projects created between 1978 and 2026, alongside a new permanent installation at Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery: the tomb that holds “the secrets of wayfarers”.

Photographs, texts, videos, installations and autobiographical stories form a circular route through more than forty years of work. Using a spare and rigorous artistic language, Sophie Calle gives personal and collective experiences a new form and context, transforming them into works of art. Her works include a countdown to the end of a relationship, an attempt to capture her mother’s last breath, an inventory of unfinished projects and encounters with people seeing the sea for the first time. Each one becomes a way of asking what ends, what remains and what might still begin.