Yan Pei-Ming breaks into Palazzo Strozzi with his monumental canvases that combine history and the contemporary. Famous works of art, public figures and intimate subjects dialogue in his work to reflect on the human condition between conventional forms and current events, reality and imagination.

From 7 July to 3 September 2023 Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Yan Pei-Ming. Painter of stories, the largest exhibition ever dedicated in Italy to the French-Chinese artist, part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art project developed with the Hillary Merkus Recordati Foundation. Curated by Arturo Galansino, the exhibition offers a journey of over thirty works that allow you to explore the artist's powerful and original research on the relationship between image and reality, in a short circuit between personal life and collective history, symbols and icons of culture and the history of art between East and West.

Famous for a profound and passionate reflection on painting in today's art, Yan Pei-Ming invites us to rethink the relationship between history and the contemporary, memory and the present. Exploring genres such as portrait, landscape, still life and history painting, his paintings come to life starting from the model of photographic images extrapolated from different sources, such as personal images, newspaper covers, film stills or famous works of history of art. Yan Pei-Ming leads us to reflect on the contradiction between reality and representation, truth and the construction of images, an increasingly central theme in the era of digital reproduction and sharing of public history and our private lives.

This is how monumental self-portraits and portraits of mother and father or historical figures such as Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler alternate together with original reinterpretations of works such as Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Velázquez's Innocent X or two covers of the magazine «Time» dedicated respectively in 2008 to the Russian president Vladimir Putin and in 2022 to the Ukrainian one Volodymyr Zelensky. In direct connection with Italy, the exhibition also hosts a sequence of paintings linked to famous photographic images that have documented dramatic moments in Italian history of the twentieth century, in a sort of trilogy of lay depositions: the upside-down display of the bodies by Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petracci in Piazzale Loreto in Milan in 1945; the lying body of Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Ostia seaplane base in 1975; the discovery of Aldo Moro in the trunk of a car in Rome in 1978.