Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino will present his first solo exhibition in Australia at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) from 7 June 2025–6 April 2026. From dripping metal to splintering wood, in the end, the beginning features a selection of kinetic sculptures that push matter to their edges, and premieres during Dark Mofo, as Tasmania’s midwinter solstice festival returns in full this year.

The exhibition’s title piece, in the end, the beginning, will see one of Mona’s subterranean galleries showered with molten steel. Heated to 1500°C, the liquid metal creates dramatic firelight sparks as it drips down from the ceiling. This work is a reimagining of the artist’s renowned installation Diplomazija astuta, originally created for the Malta Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Sassolino used the light of melted steel to evoke the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio’s 1608 altarpiece painting The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.