Milan, 19 June 2025 - Fiera Milano presented the 30th edition of miart, Milan's international modern and contemporary art fair, today in Basel - with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and ICE - Agency for the promotion abroad and internationalisation of Italian companies - in the presence of artistic director Nicola Ricciardi and the Italian Consul in Basel Benedetta Romagnoli. The 2026 edition will be held from 17 to 19 April (VIP preview on Thursday 16) and will celebrate this important milestone by enhancing its history and opening up to new horizons.
Faithful to its transversal vocation and reaffirming its open and inclusive gaze towards all artistic expressions, miart takes the occasion of the double centenary of the birth of the American musicians John Coltrane (Hamlet, 1926 - Huntington, 1967) and Miles Davis (Alton, 1926 - Santa Monica, 1991) to embrace one of the intrinsic characteristics of jazz: the ability to transform a well-known standard into fertile ground for innovation.
Through an art of visionary leaps and revelatory ruptures, Coltrane and Davis were able to improvise within known forms, finding mutability in consistency, freedom in rigour. In the same way, Fiera Milano imagines an edition of miart that is both tribute and momentum, living memory and promise of the future.
With the title New Directions - a tribute to Coltrane's famous 1963 album, but also a true declaration of intent - miart 2026 embraces a transformation that involves every aspect of its identity: from curatorial content to dialogue with the galleries, from the coordinated image to the visitor experience itself.
Between new models of collecting, emerging technologies, more fluid dynamics between artists, galleries and institutions, the art market is changing time and metrics, and the event feels the need to affirm and at the same time question its own systems.
To symbolically mark this process of evolution, miart is changing location and finding a new home in the South Wing of Allianz MiCo, an architectural space with an international feel, adjacent to the pavilion that has always hosted the fair, but overlooking the CityLife contemporary park. A new place, like a score ready to be interpreted in a new way, between experimentation and belonging, between unexplored and recognisable.
Within the exhibition complex, articulated on three levels, the historic Emergent and Established sections are confirmed as two voices in dialogue. The first, curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini and dedicated to emerging galleries betting on the future of art; the second, a framework for established realities that continue to define the present of international art, proposing projects ranging from the early 20th century to the most recent horizons of contemporaneity.
Two sections that represent solid roots from which to venture towards new explorations, such as the unpublished curated projects that will be unveiled over the coming months, and that will enrich in an original way the offer designed for gallery owners, collectors and the city and international public.
And as in jazz, where the dialogue between different instruments is essential and each voice contributes its own note to building a collective harmony, miart will give life to moments of sharing with city institutions already in the months leading up to the fair, a natural continuation of the Talks Among Friends cycle inaugurated in the last edition.
New Directions wants to be an invitation to let oneself be crossed by languages that renew themselves, by artists who dare, by galleries that bet, by a public that listens. Just as one listens to jazz: with respect, with awe, with desire.
This is the vocation of miart 2026: a fair that changes, reinvents itself, maintains its roots and confirms its identity, but speaks of the present time with an open eye to the future.
miart: 17-19 April 2026
Vip Preview:
16 pril 2026
Address:
South Wing, Allianz MiCo, Milan
For further information please refer to the official fair website:
www.miart.it