Abstraction and Violence: Rothko and the Limits of Representation
Fri 10 Jul
|Palazzo Buontalenti, Elinor Ostrom Room
Guided tour to the Rothko exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, followed by a lecture by Brad Evans (Professor of Political Violence & Aesthetics , University of Bath) and Chantal Meza (Artistic Fellow, University of Bath). Jointly organised by IFCC and EUI Visual and Material History Working Group
Time & Location
10 Jul 2026, 10:00 – 13:30
Palazzo Buontalenti, Elinor Ostrom Room, Via Camillo Cavour, 65, 50129 Firenze FI, Italy
About the event
How do you represent what is fundamentally unrepresentable?
Mark Rothko insisted that he was the most violent of all American painters. We live surrounded by images of suffering. Seeing has rarely been easier; witnessing has rarely been more difficult. This conversation asks what it means for art to keep that difference open.
Florence makes that question unavoidable. This is a city shaped by the figure, by the body as the place where the sacred, the human, and the political become visible. It was here, in 1950, that Rothko encountered Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco, an experience he would never fully leave behind. This summer, five of his paintings hang in the very cells where Angelico painted. The confrontation is direct. Where Angelico reaches for transcendence through the divine figure, Rothko refuses it. What remains is not revelation but aftermath: the void the figure leaves behind when it can no…