Pino Pascali once called the typical format for exhibitions, wherein an artist passes off finished products to someone else now charged with showing them, “a kind of graveyard.” So what does it mean that Pascali has now been awarded the greatest graveyard of them all—a retrospective? It’s a paradox, to be sure, but it’s also a gift, since this artist, whose work is more often talked about than seen in bulk, has rarely gotten the treatment. ninjaqq

Maybe that’s because Pascali’s case is a tough one for curators. For one thing, the Italian sculptor passed away when he was far too young. In 1968, when he was 32, he was killed during a motorcycling accident, arguably at the point in his career when his star burned the brightest. In his wake, he left behind an impressive but small body of work—not the sort of thing that’s traditionally conducive to big show.

For another, Pascali has been lumped in with Arte Povera since his work melds natural materials and industrial ones. But he’d already been doing that before Arte Povera was even formed. This means that Pascali resists classification, belonging to no specific movement at all.

The best thing way forward, it seems, is to let Pascali’s memory linger on in all its messy glory. That’s exactly what curator Mark Godfrey has done with his sprawling retrospective for the artist at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. It’s a must-see for anyone who cares at all about European postwar art and, for good reason, it’s likely to be a point of pilgrimage for those headed to Venice this week.

The show assembles a significant chunk of Pascali’s oeuvre in one space—a feat unto itself. Yet the exhibition mostly does not move viewers chronologically through his career, instead focusing on how the artist chose to exhibit his work during his lifetime. Pascali’s methods were unorthodox, to say the least.

An entire section of this rich show is given over to promotional photography of Pascali alongside his sculptures. These are no staid portraits. Take the one by Claude Abate in which he is situated alongside Vedova blu (Blue Widow, 1967), a large sculpture of a spider that is covered in faux fur dyed a garish shade of blue. Rather than standing alongside the work, or even honing it into being, Pascali is shown beneath his wacky arachnid, pretending to tumble head over heels. (The sculpture itself is presented alongside a blow-up of the picture.) Pascali seemed to assert that the only way to keep his sculptures from being interred was to breathe some life into them through playfulness. ninjaqq

Another section is devoted to Pascali’s exhibitions themselves, which, as Godfrey points out, were sometimes subject to change. You don’t always get that impression when walking through the Fondazione Prada’s galleries, since the show won’t shift much over the course of its run. But even the objects themselves speak well to a mischievous artist whose work, however conceptual, was always borne out of a desire for a good time.

Among the restaged shows at the Fondazione Prada is one initially put on by dealer Gian Enzo Sperone in 1966. The exhibition featured what appeared to be an array of weaponry—a missile, a cannon, an aircraft. In fact, none of this functioned as it appeared, as Pascali had assembled it all from scraps at hand. No one would be able to fire his 1966 sculpture Mitragliatrice (Machine Gun), for example, because its parts had all been recycled from a Fiat 500. Essentially, Pascali had turned a pricey consumerist object into little more than a toy, one that looks like it should be used for killing but instead is just a reincarnated car. ninjaqq