Sophie Calle is taking over MAXXI. The Rome museum has opened the largest solo exhibition ever devoted to the French artist in Italy, running from 16 October 2026 to 7 February 2027 after a press preview on 15 October. The show assembles some 450 works across eight projects made between 1978 and 2026, and will run for nearly four months.

Calle's work has long turned private life into public narrative: surveillance, absence, mourning and the rituals around them are her materials. This retrospective, curated by Simona Antonacci, traces almost five decades of that practice, from the early conceptual projects of the late 1970s to the most recent ones. For an artist whose medium is often biography itself, the scale is the statement.

The exhibition also extends beyond the museum's walls. Calle has created a new permanent installation for Rome's Protestant Cemetery — the resting place of Keats and Shelley — anchoring her work in the city in a way that will outlast the show. The gesture is characteristically hers: a public intervention that deals with grief, memory and the presence of the dead.

Calle's hold on the contemporary imagination has only grown with time, and MAXXI's retrospective is timed to meet it. Few living artists have made so consistent a project of turning the most painful passages of life into form, and fewer still have done so while keeping the public on their side. For Italian audiences, who have not previously seen her work in this breadth, the wait is over.