Mimmo Paladino: The Silence of the Sleepers and the Shape of Myth

A central figure in contemporary Italian art, Mimmo Paladino has, over the past decades, developed a distinctive visual language suspended between myth, memory, and matter. Emerging in the 1970s in critical dialogue with the avant-garde, his practice gradually turned toward an archaic imagination, where symbols and figures evoke a timeless dimension. In Milan, within the Sala Stirling at Palazzo Citterio, the artist returns with an immersive project dedicated to the Dormienti (The Sleepers), among his most iconic works. Thirty-two terracotta sculptures, lying in fetal positions, inhabit the space like silent presences: bodies suspended between sleep and wakefulness, between life and memory. The installation unfolds as a quasi-theatrical landscape, open to movement, where visitors are invited to walk through and engage with the works. These figures, echoing both the casts of Pompeii and the drawings of Henry Moore, do not convey tragedy but an enigmatic stillness charged with introspection. A subtle sound dimension accompanies the installation, amplifying the sensory experience and transforming the space into a total environment. Completing the exhibition, a group of drawings from 1973 reveals the origins of Paladino’s poetics: drawing as the first gesture, myth as an inexhaustible source. What emerges is a coherent vision in which the artwork does not simply occupy space, but transforms it.