Rosalia alpina
at YICCA 2026, Milan

Rosalia alpina · Fiurdelin · YICCA 2026 · Centro Culturale di Milano

Rosalia alpina illustration has been selected for YICCA 2026 — the International Contest of Contemporary Art organised by Moho Association — with the final exhibition taking place at Centro Culturale di Milano from 27 June to 11 July 2026. The cultural centre sits in the historical heart of Milan, near the Duomo. From Lake Como, it is twenty minutes by train.

Fiurdelin’s Rosalia alpina has been selected for YICCA 2026 — the International Contest of Contemporary Art — with the final exhibition at Centro Culturale di Milano, 27 June to 11 July 2026.

A Contemporary Context
for a Classical Subject

YICCA selects eighteen artists for its final exhibition from an international pool of submissions. The works shown alongside Rosalia alpina will be paintings, installations, photographs, video works — the full range of contemporary art practice. A digital natural history illustration standing among them is an unusual thing. That is, in part, the point.

The illustration was submitted under Digital Graphics because that is what it is technically. Yet the method behind it is older than any of the categories on the form. After all, every natural history illustrator working in the European tradition — from the Flemish botanical draughtsmen of the sixteenth century to the entomological illustrators whose plates still appear in scientific publications — worked from the same discipline: sustained observation, patient rendering, accuracy as the primary obligation. The medium changed, but the habit of looking did not.

“The Alpine Longhorn for the Alpine Fellowship — well, the YICCA connection is simpler: an Italian organisation, an Italian artist, a beetle from the Italian Alps. It felt less like coincidence than like permission.”

Rosalia alpina is IUCN Vulnerable, and old-growth beech forest is disappearing across the Alps. The beetle needs very specific, very old trees, and those trees are being removed. So most people have never seen one. When the work is placed in a contemporary art exhibition rather than a natural history context, however, it makes a slightly different argument: that precise observation of a threatened species is a form of contemporary art practice, not a relic of one.

Rosalia alpina · Digital illustration, Adobe Fresco · 2025

Centro Culturale di Milano —
The Exhibition Space

The Centro Culturale di Milano was founded in 1981 by a group of students and scholars from the University of Milan. Over four decades it has hosted philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists from across the world — from Emmanuel Levinas and Czesław Miłosz to Carlo Rubbia and Riccardo Muti. It operates near the Duomo, in a building with a documented history stretching back to the intellectual circles of eighteenth-century Milan.

For a work rooted in the natural history illustration tradition — a practice that has always sat at the intersection of scientific enquiry and artistic judgment — the Centro Culturale di Milano is an apt setting. The institution’s ethos is precisely that conversation between disciplines: between knowledge and experience, between rigour and beauty. So placing a vulnerable beetle in that room, in that city, feels like the right kind of argument to be making.

This follows the EXTINCTION: Save the Planet 2026 exhibition, where Rosalia alpina and Lucanus cervus were selected for Gallerium’s annual conservation-focused international show. Each exhibition places the same work in a different conversation, though the work itself does not change. The Life Forms 2026 exhibition placed the bumblebee in a global natural history context. YICCA places the Alpine Longhorn in Milan’s contemporary art scene. While the frame keeps changing, the work is the same.

The Rosalia alpina Print

The Rosalia alpina illustration is available as a print from the Fiurdelin collection.

Browse the collection →

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