On the occasion of Art Basel Unlimited 2025, Cardi Gallery presents for the first time outside of Italy the complete cycle of Mimmo Paladino’s Testimoni, bringing together all twenty monumental sculptures in a new, site-specific configuration.
This landmark presentation offers international audiences the opportunity to experience one of the artist’s most ambitious and historically significant installations.
Created in 2009 and first exhibited in 2012, the Testimoni (Witnesses) are life-size human figures carved from tuff, a stone rich in symbolic and geological memory. With their schematic, solemn faces, these sculptures embody Paladino’s visual language, which blends historical archetypes, mythology, and esoteric elements into a timeless and allusive poetics. Each figure appears to emerge from a suspended ritual, charged with silent intensity, as a witness to a constantly evolving collective memory.
Paladino’s practice has long centered on the recovery and reimagining of archaic forms, and the Testimoni represent one of the most coherent expressions of this approach. These androgynous presences-still, yet full of meaning-recall the human figures that have inhabited Paladino’s large-scale canvases since the late 1970s, reinforcing a deeply evocative and cohesive aesthetic universe.
With this presentation at Unlimited, Cardi Gallery not only highlights the sculptural power of Paladino’s work but also places it within a global context, emphasizing its symbolic resonance and its ability to engage with contemporary space.
