Arcangelo Sassolino at the MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Australia

Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino will present his first solo exhibition in Australia at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) from 7 June 2025–6 April 2026. From dripping metal to splintering wood, in the end, the beginning features a selection of kinetic sculptures that push matter to their edges, and premieres during Dark Mofo, as Tasmania’s midwinter solstice festival returns in full this year.

The exhibition’s title piece, in the end, the beginning, will see one of Mona’s subterranean galleries showered with molten steel. Heated to 1500°C, the liquid metal creates dramatic firelight sparks as it drips down from the ceiling. This work is a reimagining of the artist’s renowned installation Diplomazija astuta, originally created for the Malta Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Sassolino used the light of melted steel to evoke the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio’s 1608 altarpiece painting The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.

Sassolino has scaled up his interest in mechanics and technology, creating dynamic sculptures that test the laws of physics. Known for complex kinetic works, automata and installations, he uses force, tension, speed, heat and gravity to create dramatic transformations in his—often industrial—materials, along with a sense of danger and suspense. The persistent effort required to sustain existence is an intrinsic element of his work. All Sassolino’s sculptures incorporate a sort of countdown mechanism, reinforcing a reflection on time as an integral part of the experience, heightening anticipation and emphasising the ephemeral nature of material states and motion.

At Mona, Sassolino will present five additional sculptures alongside in the end, the beginning that highlight his relentless exploration of matter and its physical limits. This includes violenza casuale, a work in which wooden beams, bound by steel cables, are continuously crushed by hydraulic pressure causing them to splinter and disintegrate. A similar interplay of tension and fragility is seen in the paradoxical nature of life where a pane of glass bows under the weight of a large boulder. The sculpture marcus shows a tyre squeezed and warped out of shape, while no memory without loss features two three-metre discs slowly rotating on the wall, trickling industrial oil down the centre of the disc.

"in the end, the beginning" will be presented from 7 June 2025 to 6 April 2026.

Photo credit: Ginevra Formentini