From October 18, 2025 to January 18, 2026, the MAR - Art Museum of the city of Ravenna presents Marc Chagall in mosaic. From project to work, the first exhibition entirely dedicated to the bond between the great artist and the mosaic technique - a surprising and still little-known chapter of his creative path.

The exhibition inaugurates the IX Biennale of Contemporary Mosaic, which returns next autumn to Ravenna with three months of events, exhibitions, and installations spread throughout the city. A unique event of its kind, dedicated to an ancient artistic language capable of renewing itself and dialoguing with contemporaneity. The Biennale is promoted, organized, and supported by the Municipality of Ravenna - Department of Culture and Mosaic, and coordinated by the MAR.

Produced in co-production with the Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice, Chagall in mosaic. From project to work represents a key moment in the rediscovery of an extraordinary and still little-known chapter of the artist's work: his relationship with mosaic, born in the fifties in close dialogue with the city of Ravenna and its excellent craftsmen.

The exhibition, which has Nice as its first stop between May and September 2025, is part of the in-depth cycles promoted by the French museum on the different techniques experimented by Chagall. It then continues at the MAR in Ravenna, where it is ideally linked to the work that the museum has been carrying out for years in the context of the Biennale of Contemporary Mosaic, dedicated to the exploration of mosaic in modern and contemporary art.

The bond between Chagall and Ravenna was born in 1954, when the artist visited the city and was deeply struck by the beauty and spirituality of the Byzantine mosaics. A year later, at the initiative of art historian Lionello Venturi and Giuseppe Bovini, then director of the National Museum of Ravenna, Chagall was invited to participate in the Exhibition of Modern Mosaics. The exhibition - conceived together with Giulio Carlo Argan and Palma Bucarelli - involved international artists and Ravenna mosaicists, and represents a fundamental stage in the history of contemporary mosaic: many of the works created for that occasion are now the historical core of the MAR's permanent collection.