Donato Sansone. Metaversi

Starting from April 7, 2025, the ground floor of the National Museum of Cinema  will host the exhibition Donato Sansone. Metaversi, showcasing some of the artist's works. Sansone is known for creating surreal and provocative pieces using different techniques that translate various visions of reality into graphic drawings and animations. The exhibition, which will be open until September 8, 2025, is curated by Bruno Di Marino.

Sansone explores the boundary between traditional drawing and digital innovation, bringing to life animated visions that elude any clear definition. His works feature an endless play of shapes, signs, and layers that blend craftsmanship with technological experimentation, creating an immersive and irreverent experience that is both playful and thought-provoking.

This is the first solo exhibition dedicated to Donato Sansone, artist, animator, and creator of short films, music videos, commercials, and other audiovisual “pranks” — surreal and provocative works made using a variety of techniques that translate different visions of reality into graphic design and animation.

Like the historical avant-gardes, Sansone blends high and low culture, the poetic with the vulgar, the comic with the tragic — ultimately disrupting conventional thought and provoking an acidic laughter in the viewer. His universe is one of mockery and paradox, with a playful and provocative surrealism that moves between the handcrafted and the digital.

His patchworks and videos have been showcased at major festivals around the world and exhibited in various galleries, as well as in high-traffic venues such as shopping malls. He is beloved in the Italian music scene and has long collaborated with artists such as Subsonica, Manuel Agnelli, Paolo Spaccamonti, Francesco De Gregori, Afterhours and Verdena.

The exhibition spans twenty years of Donato Sansone’s career, offering a vibrant and engaging journey through original drawings, digital prints, installations, and a vast array of moving images that allow visitors to explore his eclectic visual art. The metaverse is a virtual dimension to inhabit and explore, and the exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in a chaotic flow of signs, images, sounds, noises, perceptions, fragments of bodies and landscapes, and rapid visual associations. Not just one metaverse, but many metaverses, where each visitor will find something different: something attractive and unsettling, comic and horrific, physical and intangible, erotic and phantasmagorical.

All sections of the exhibition include LIS (Italian Sign Language) video content, and the Museum’s Educational Services will offer a special workshop activity for summer camp groups.

Accompanying the exhibition is the catalogue Donato Sansone. Metaversi, edited by Bruno Di Marino and published by Silvana Editoriale. Alongside exhibition materials, the volume includes the artist’s graphic novel titled Il gatto (The Cat).

The exhibition is part of an ongoing project to preserve and promote Donato Sansone’s work, all of which is held in deposit at the Museum Cineteca.

The exhibition is included in the Museum's entrance ticket.

• Tickets