Our Grade 12 IB Visual Arts students stepped out of the studio and into the living anatomy of contemporary art during visits to Galleria Uno Su Nove and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill. These encounters moved beyond passive observation, asking students to deconstruct how exhibitions think, how meaning is not merely displayed but generated through sequencing, adjacency, and material dialogue.
In each space, students examined the syntax of the exhibition: how one work’s colour field prepared the eye for another’s restraint; how a textural shift, from impasto to graphite, from glazed surface to raw linen, altered emotional register. They analysed, at a granular level, how a painting’s structure, its compositional rhythm, and the density of its pigment carried intention and ambiguity in equal measure.
Through discussion and close looking, they explored how curation functions as an extension of artistic language, how the placement of a sculpture in relation to a gestural painting can sharpen both through contrast, how negative space becomes active, how light and sightline dictate the viewer’s tempo of encounter.
A highlight was curator Giulia Tornasello’s generous walkthrough at Uno Su Nove, where she unpacked the silent decisions behind exhibition flow, material kinship, and visual pacing. Students witnessed how every wall, every interval, and every surface participates in the act of meaning-making.
These experiences affirmed the IB’s belief that art is not simply made, it is curated into being. Our students returned to their studios newly attentive to the architecture of their own practice: to how material, gesture, and placement together become language.
MMI Art Expanded Classroom 
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