Cover photo: Noire et blanche, 1926. Stampa ai sali d’argento, 17,3×23,5 cm. Collezione privata © Man Ray 2015 Trust / ADAGP-SIAE – 2024, image: Telimage, Paris
From September 24, 2025, to January 11, 2026, the halls of Palazzo Reale in Milan will host Man Ray. Forme di Luce (Forms of Light) is one of the most comprehensive retrospectives ever dedicated to the American photographer and artist. Over 200 works, including original prints, rayographs, collages, experimental films, and drawings, reconstruct the visual world of Man Ray, a key figure of the 20th-century avant-garde and a true pioneer of the interplay between light, technique, and image.
Organized in collaboration with the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie, and curated by Pierre-Yves Butzbach and Robert Rocca, the exhibition follows a thematic and chronological path retracing the artist’s major creative phases—from his early years in New York to his long period in Paris, where he became one of the most radical and innovative figures of the Dada and Surrealist movements.
Over 200 works in the exhibition “Man Ray. Forme di Luce”
The exhibition opens with self-portraits and experimental photographs from the 1920s, revealing the artist’s early fascination with photography’s technical possibilities.
The undisputed stars of the show are the rayographs (or rayograms), images made without a camera. Everyday objects are placed directly onto photosensitive paper, briefly exposed to light, and developed in the darkroom.
These works don’t represent—they evoke. They don’t describe—they suggest.
Born from a process suspended between control and chance, these compositions render light as matter, abstract drawing, and poetic gesture imprinted onto film. In the following rooms, we find his solarization experiments, inverted negatives, and reflective compositions—many created with Lee Miller, a fellow photographer and companion for many years.
Portraiture in Man Ray’s Dadaist works
Beyond his most famous experiments, the exhibition devotes ample space to Man Ray’s portraiture.
Iconic faces such as Kiki de Montparnasse, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Miller are captured through unusual angles, sharp cuts, and striking light-and-shadow effects, turning their likenesses into apparitions.
For Man Ray, portraiture was never mere reproduction—it was interpretation, sometimes even transfiguration. Light became an expressive tool, used to highlight features, suggest emotions, and evoke visions. In his images, the boundary between reality and artifice fades into a dimension where dream and light merge.
Man Ray’s visual grammar is built on light
The exhibition is organized into sections that weave intimate and experimental images, commercial work (fashion, advertising, still life), avant-garde films, and sculptural objects.
In every case, light is the structuring element, the living, meaningful matter of the work. Surfaces, bodies, and objects are captured in a space that light itself shapes, distorts, and fragments. This deep relationship between photography and light is where the true essence of Man Ray’s work emerges: a constant inquiry into the meaning of the image, its ambiguity, and its imaginative potential.The exhibition pairs his photographs with archival material, negatives, letters, and objects, offering a rich and multifaceted look at his legacy.
The Exhibition at Palazzo Reale and photography as conceptual art
Man Ray. Forme di Luce is a tribute to one of the 20th century’s most influential artists and an invitation to reflect on photography as an open, fluid language—a medium capable of merging with painting, writing, cinema, and sculpture.
It’s a practice where technique becomes thought, and light—pure, distorted, reflected, or direct—becomes the key to another way of seeing.