What was so striking about Alice Cattaneo’s first solo exhibition in Italy was her unusual ability to get surprising results with very simple means. The first room in the gallery contained a sculpture composed of sheets of gray cardboard, colored cubes used to teach elementary math, and thin sticks of wood, the sort that hobbyists use in constructing their model airplanes and sailboats, all held together with fragments of duct tape. This ephemeral “plastic complex,” somewhat reminiscent of those Constructivist reliefs located in space in the most unexpected manner, was striking for its skillful

This exhibition by Maurizio Mochetti, a Roman artist who had his first solo show in 1968, resembled an adolescent’s playroom. One installation—Pinguini (Penguins), 1987/2005—included a group of models of Nazi rockets with multicolored paint jobs, apparently ready to blast off vertically. Nearby, in Baka con punti laser (Baka with Laser Points), 1976/2005, a red laser beam cut across the length of a model of a Japanese missile. Another room contained Gee Bee, 1983/2004, a model of an American fighter plane from the ’30s, equipped with a motor, turned on at chance intervals, which would have