Bolzano, 1 5.10 .2026 – Museion presents RAMM:ELL:ZEE TIME:LINE, the only Italian presentation of the first comprehensive European retrospective devoted to RAMMELLZEE (1960–2010). Spanning two floors of the museum, the exhibition brings together more than 150 works, the majority of which have never before been shown in Italy, offering an extensive view of the artist’s radical and multifaceted practice. Developed in collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the Capc Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, TIME:LINE marks the final chapter of a major exhibition project dedicated to RAMMELLZEE.

Building on the 2025 Museion exhibition Graffiti, the first institutional survey in Italy dedicated to the relationship between graffiti and contemporary fine art, TIME:LINE extends Museion’s long-term research into non-violent forms of resistance and art as a social and urban practice. A central figure in Graffiti, RAMMELLZEE now becomes the subject of a deeper exploration of how language, identity and visual culture can operate as forces of resistance.

“With the Museion exhibition titled Graffiti, we established a new art historical perspective on graffiti as one of the most influential visual and social languages, as opposed to its predominant institutional framing as an ‘outsider’ practice. TIME:LINE takes that research to its most demanding case: an artist who armed the alphabet itself, and whose relationship to Italy has never been examined in an exhibition until now.”
(Bart van der Heide, Director Museion)

Artist, theorist, sculptor, performer and Master of Ceremonies, RAMMELLZEE was one of the most influential and least classifiable figures of the New York art and hip-hop scenes of the 1980s. He adopted his name in 1979, setting it out as an equation rather than an identity, and in the same year published a treatise establishing the two theories that would govern his work for the next thirty years: Gothic Futurism and Iconoclastic Panzerism. Language, he argued, was an instrument of control, and its letters had to be redesigned as visual weapons in order to break that control. Ornament became weaponry.

As its title indicates, the exhibition is structured around a timeline. Four parallel chronologies run through the exhibition spaces: RAMMELLZEE’s life, art and culture, science and technology, and society and politics. Beginning in 1801 with the discovery of ultraviolet radiation, the chronologies in the exhibition pass through Marinetti’s “words-in-freedom”, the patenting of epoxy resin, the invention of aerosol paint and the assassination of Malcolm X. Together they reconstruct the chemical, technological and political conditions that made the work possible, and situate a practice usually filed under graffiti within a considerably longer history.

Two groups of loans, secured for the Bolzano chapter alone, make that longer history explicit. Three illuminated codices from the Abbey of Novacella, in the Isarco Valley, are shown alongside RAMMELLZEE’s paintings: a fourteenth-century Speculum iudicale produced in Bologna, a Lectionarium Missae from the abbey’s own scriptorium, and an early sixteenth-century musical and astronomical miscellany. They give material form to the descent from medieval scribes that RAMMELLZEE claimed for himself in 1979. Alongside them, works by Fortunato Depero set Futurist typographic explosion beside RAMMELLZEE’s armed letters, and mark the point at which he took up the formal apparatus of Italian Futurism while turning its militancy against the languages of domination rather than, as Marinetti did, in their service.

The exhibition also follows the artist’s own routes through the country. He showed with the gallerist Lidia Carrieri, performed at Valentino’s twenty-fifth anniversary in Milan in 1984, was interviewed by the Bologna critic Francesca Alinovi, and between 1984 and 1988 produced a series of paintings on marble in Martina Franca, in Puglia.“My style has not broken with the art of illumination,” he said of that period. “I simply went further. I completed my letters by constructing them.”

At the center of the exhibition stands Gasholear , the exoskeleton RAMMELLZEE built between 1987 and 1998 and wore in performance, and which is generally considered his masterpiece: a bulletproof arsenal weighing 150 kilograms, equipped with flamethrowers, rocket launchers, four loudspeakers, a vocoder and strobe lights. Around it are the Letter Racers, his squadron of armed and hybrid letters; the Garbage Gods and the Monster Models; and the mirrored pyramid designed by the artist with his wife Carmela Zagari Rammellzee to hold his ashes, beneath which a sealed capsule guards the never-revealed solution to his equation. Museion also presents a group of crown-bracelets discovered in the artist’s storage and never before shown in public.

RAMMELLZEE’s work is shown in the company of the artists who surrounded him and of those who followed, among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Futura 2000, Phase 2, Dondi White, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Martin Wong, David Hammons, Gordon Matta-Clark and Arthur Jafa. Photographs by Henry Chalfant, Maripol and Gianni Pettena, and films by Charlie Ahearn and Jim Jarmusch, document the scene in which the artist moved.

TIME:LINE completes a three-part exhibition developed jointly by the Palais de Tokyo, the Capc and Museion. The first chapter, in Paris (February 21–September 7, 2025), immersed visitors in RAMMELLZEE’s substances and materials; the second, in Bordeaux (November 20, 2025–April 19, 2026), placed his work in dialogue with artists of different generations. The new iteration at Museion marks a natural continuation of the project. It foregrounds RAMMELLZEE’s connection to Italy, where part of his family originated and where he developed a significant and formative dimension of his artistic practice. For the first time, the exhibition also introduces a dedicated space for creative mediation, inviting audiences to explore RAMMELLZEE’s theories through direct experimentation with the alphabet.

at Museion, Bolzano
until March 14, 2027

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