Housepainter II joins Atlas on 28 October, beside Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear), a vitrine of hundreds of collected objects next to a room being painted from the inside
Housepainter II (2025) by Alex Da Corte joins Atlas, the permanent project of Fondazione Prada in Milan. The work opens to the public on Wednesday 28 October 2026 on the eighth floor of the Torre, alongside Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) (2022), already installed in the same space.
From September 2025, and for a year, Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) had been set in dialogue with Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum (1965–1977), on loan from the mumok in Vienna. With that exchange closed, the two works by Da Corte stand next to each other for the first time.
Atlas at Fondazione Prada, the permanent project across the Torre floors
Atlas gathers monographic presentations and pairings of works made by international artists between 1960 and 2025, mapping the ideas that have shaped the activity of Fondazione Prada since 1993. The project changes over time, one floor at a time. The Torre, designed by the studio OMA and opened in 2018, carries it across several levels, and the eighth floor now holds the two installations.
Housepainter II, the Pink Panther with roller, bucket and dust sheet
Alex Da Corte, born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980, works across video, performance, installation, painting and sculpture, with sustained attention to colour and form. He combines references to high and low American culture — everyday consumer goods, popular characters — to examine social politics, alienation and the psychological dimensions of experience.
In Housepainter II the artist takes on the Pink Panther, presented as a house painter working the walls of the exhibition space with a roller, a bucket and a dust sheet. Self-representation runs through action and physical presence, and the painting progressively transforms the room containing it. An earlier site-specific video work, Rubber Pencil Devil (2018), was presented in 2020 at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai.
Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear), hundreds of objects inside a severed-ear plan
Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) was made in 2022 for the survey exhibition Mr. Remember at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark, as a declared homage to Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum. Oldenburg, born in Stockholm in 1929 and died in New York in 2022, had turned his own collection of industrially produced objects into a permanent museum.
Da Corte keeps the plan of the original, in which the head of Mickey Mouse merges with the outline of a film camera, and cuts off an ear, in reference to the episode in the life of Vincent van Gogh. Inside, a long vitrine holds hundreds of objects of popular culture from his personal collection: preserved, arranged and set in relation to one another, they build a self-portrait by accumulation.
Two opposite ways of occupying a room
The two installations behave inversely towards space. The first is a closed, introspective structure where objects are gathered and held. The second opens outward and takes the room through colour and gesture.
«Formally, Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) and Housepainter II are two reflections on the idea of containment and on our attempts to understand and shape the world», says Da Corte. «The Mouse Museum is a mausoleum, a repository of things found and made, collected and presented in a kind of daydream. In that austere space, the finest qualities and the subtlest differences are amplified. Housepainter II instead wants to expand, changing the environment and pushing further and further outward. Pausing in the middle of an epic labour, the house painter wonders how much work is still ahead of him, and how far his actions can colour a boundless landscape».
Both interventions work the codes of popular culture — the severed ear, the Pink Panther — and question the way works are traditionally displayed. «The black monolith, rooted, seeming to swallow the light, invites viewers inside a mind, perhaps their own», says Da Corte. «A pink field, flooded with sunlight, illuminates the world around us».
