The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea has started a new chapter in its history with the exhibition Time is Out of Joint. The display is part of a wide process—initiated on June 21, 2016 and lead by Director Cristiana Collu, aimed at transforming, rearranging, and renovating the museum, which now offers the public totally renewed spaces and a profound reinterpretation of its collection.

The exhibition, whose title quotes a verse from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet—“The time is out of joint”—investigates the notion of time in its fluidity, non-linearity, and stratification; a fragmented time which seems to embody art historian Hans Belting’s dilemma “the end of the history of art, or art’s freedom.”

A linear vision of history is utterly abandoned: in the exhibition rooms artworks are present as sediments of the long life of the museum, and those from different centuries coexist in the same space, from Antonio Canova, Giacomo Balla, Alighiero Boetti, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Paul Cézanne, Giorgio De Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Francesco Hayez, Gustav Klimt, Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kounellis, Amedeo Modigliani, Piet Mondrian, Vincent van Gogh to Marion Baruch, Cristina Lucas, Adrian Paci, Alessandro Piangiamore, Luca Rento, Sophie Ristelhueber, Davide Rivalta, Jeff Wall just to mention but a few.