Rodney Smith
From October 4th 2025 to February 1st 2026, Palazzo Roverella hosts, for the first time in Italy, a large monographic exhibition that celebrates the surreal elegance of Rodney Smith (1947-2016), the New York photographer who helped transforming the ordinary in extraordinary. His pictures, always analogical, become silent stories where every detail is harmony and where formal rigor, humor and raffinatezza fuse together.
His shots narrate worlds suspended between reality and dream, lived by figures outside time, immersed in silences and symmetries that evoke cinematographic scenarios. Smith doesn’t describe reality: he reinvents it with lightness, suggesting more that explaining. In his works, you can perceive a fragile but perfect balance between chaos and order, daily and ideal.
As Walker Evans’ student and influenced by directors like Hitchcock, Malick and Wes Anderson, Smith favored black and white as his stylistic choice, even though he experimented with colors with exceptional results in 2002. His works, today important part of international collections, are organized in an exhibition route which alternates between classical proportions and poetic visions. Moreover, through six thematic sections from La divina proporzione to Passaggi, the exhibition, curated by Anne Morin, becomes a poetic journey in the mind of the artist capable of chanting and amazing. A visual experience that slows the glaze and gives us back the pleasure of letting ourselves go.
Rodney Smith: Fotografia Tra Reale e Surreale
October 3, 2025 - February 1, 2026
Palazzo Roverella
Via Giuseppe Laurenti
8/10 Rovigo 45100
Rovigo, Italy
Read more about the exhibition here.