Corpus Domini — Dal corpo glorioso alle rovine dell'anima

Corpus Domini: From the Glorious Body to the Ruins of the Soul brought together 111 works by 34 internationally recognized artists at Palazzo Reale in Milan, spanning installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, video, and photography across nearly 1,000 square meters of exhibition space. Curated by Francesca Alfano Miglietti, the show traced how contemporary art has represented the human body, from a "glorious body" tied to consciousness and rebellion to a body reshaped by spectacle, technology, and artifice. Its title pointed to a broader disappearance of the "real body" in favor of an image of the body built for display.

Artists including Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Andres Serrano, Chiharu Shiota, and Carole A. Feuerman, the only woman associated with American Hyperrealism, were featured alongside Duane Hanson, Robert Gober, Gino De Dominicis, and many others, several of them shown in Italy for the first time. Together, their works examined a sense of crisis around sensory experience in a culture increasingly drawn to bodies that are perfected, modified, and reproduced, ultimately reflecting on what happens to the idea of the "real" once the body itself becomes spectacle. The exhibition ran from October 27, 2021 through January 30, 2022.