Robert Wilson illuminates Rondanini's Pietà on the eve of the Salone del Mobile

It is Robert Wilson who in fact inaugurates Salone del Mobile 2025: he does so with an installation, "Mother", at the Pietà Rondanini Museum, inside Castello Sforzesco, dialoguing with Michelangelo's masterpiece and the music of Arvo Pärt. A tribute to light, to art, to the city, realised in collaboration with the City of Milan, Mother is the first installation of the Salone del Mobile to open to the public: it will be open to the public from tomorrow, Sunday 6 April, in an ideal bridge with Milano Art Week, and will then close on 18 May, offering the city the opportunity to book a visit beyond the design week (above, two images of the installation, ©Lucie Jansch).

In the year of Euroluce (which alternates with Eurocucine, which will be inside the Salone del Mobile 2026), the famous American artist signs a work dedicated to the work that, together with Leonardo's Last Supper, is often thought of as the most iconic in Milan. In keeping with the setting designed in 2015 by Michele De Lucchi in the Spanish Hospital, Wilson, a master in the creative use of light, gives life to an installation, which measures itself with the power of the 'unfinished', an energy suspended between matter and thought, in a dramaturgical dialogue with Stabat Mater, a medieval prayer in the vocal and instrumental version by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. In it lies a profound reflection on the dimension of time and space. "Mother is not a setting, but a breath, an opening, an invitation to contemplation. It is a dialogue between light, shadow and sound, an experience that does not tell, but welcomes, allowing the spectator to find his own inner space, his own intimate emotional resonance,' reads the presentation. For this extraordinary encounter between art and light, Wilson has chosen the music of Arvo Pärt, with whom he shares a vision of time and space made up of structured silences and vibrant expectations.

"Light is what gives shape to space. Without light, space does not exist. Albert Einstein said that light is the measure of all things. For me it is always the starting point: it is not just a technical element, but a living presence, the beginning of everything,' says Robert Wilson. 'When I first saw Michelangelo's Pietà Rondanini, I sat in front of the work for more than an hour. Then I got up and started walking around it. I felt a powerful energy, an almost mystical presence. Perhaps it is precisely the fact that it is unfinished that makes it so extraordinary. It is like an open window, a space suspended between the visible and the invisible. It gave me a different time, a new space in which to think, to dream. The idea of putting it on stage struck me deeply: the Pieta did not need a set but a space, a breath, silence, so that those who observe it can lose themselves in their own thoughts and emotions. It was then that I thought of the music of Arvo Pärt. There is something common between his music and this masterpiece: a sense of time that dilates, a space that opens and welcomes. Together, art and music do not tell, they do not explain: they simply allow us to feel emotions'.

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