The BOB DYLAN exhibition opens on 16 December at the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts. Retrospectrum, curated by Shai Baitel, the first retrospective in Europe dedicated to the visual art works of one of the most important icons of contemporary world culture. After being at the MAM in Shanghai and the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, the exhibition arrives in Rome in a completely redesigned version to interact with the dynamic and futuristic spaces of Zaha Hadid's MAXXI. Sponsors of Ferrovie dello Stato and UniCredit.

Over 100 works on display including paintings, watercolors, ink and graphite drawings, metal sculptures, video material, which explore over 50 years of Bob Dylan's creative activity.

Bob Dylan himself says: “It is very gratifying to know that my visual works are exhibited at the MAXXI in Rome: a truly special museum in one of the most beautiful and inspiring cities in the world. This exhibition aims to offer different points of view, which examine the human condition and explore those mysteries of life that continue to perplex us. It's very different from my music, of course, but it has the same intent."

The exhibited works highlight those motifs which have always been part of Dylan's musician imagination and which return, in the form of drawing and colour, also in his paintings. As he himself writes in the exhibition catalog (edited by Shai Baitel and published by Skira), his visual art works narrate “the American landscape as seen across the country, observing it for what it is. Staying away from the main roads and traveling only on secondary roads, in total freedom". Great metropolises, barren and endless landscapes, railway tracks, open roads, cars, trucks, petrol stations, motels, shacks, bars, shops, courtyards, billboards, neon signs: as in his songs and poems, also in his paintings Dylan makes deeper America poetic. “I choose images for what they mean to me – he writes - . These paintings have the realism of the instant, archaic, mostly static, but nonetheless traversed by a thrill. I am the world that I see or choose to see, that I am a part of or enter. Anyway, this is my job."