WHY EXHIBITIONS HURT US: THE NECESSARY ART THAT STAYS ON OUR SKIN

We walk into exhibitions expecting to admire “beauty.” We long for perfect lines, harmonious colors, and subjects that reassure us.

Yet the works that truly strike us, the ones that imprint themselves onto our emotional memory, are often anything but comforting. They disturb us, question us, and sometimes, they hurt. The truth is that the art that matters doesn’t seek approval. It seeks necessity.

Beauty is a measure of sensory pleasure and formal harmony.Necessity, instead, is an existential and moral issue.

A painting can be technically magnificent yet leave us indifferent once the initial awe fades, because it asked nothing of us. Conversely, works like Picasso’s Guernica, the many series on the Holocaust, or Alberto Burri’s slashed, wounded canvases are rarely labeled as “beautiful” in the conventional sense.

These pieces exert an almost physical pressure, a force that compels us to confront the raw, unresolved, essential aspects of human experience.

They do not say, “Look how skilled I am.”They say: “This is the world. This is suffering. This is what it means to be alive right now.”

The urgency of necessary art

When an artist creates a necessary work, they’re not decorating a wall. They’re performing an inevitable act, an attempt to give shape to an idea, a trauma, a truth that would otherwise remain mute and unbearable.

Munch’s The Scream, for example, is not a pleasant landscape. It is the visualisation of universal anguish, a painted scream.A necessary image wounds us because, the moment we face it, we stop being spectators and become witnesses of that gesture and that truth.

Our empathy activates. We find ourselves sharing the weight the artist tried to transfer onto the canvas.

The art that hurts us is the art that wakes us up

The true power of these images lies in their ability to act as open wounds across time. Many works that endure are those that managed to capture a crucial moment of their era and give it a visual form, not as a document, but as an emotional monument.

The exhibitions that “hurt” us are, in reality, the ones offering a precious service:they tear us away from the anesthesia of daily life. They remind us that art is not merely entertainment or investment, but a radical language, capable of expressing what words cannot hold.

The work that remains imprinted in our minds is not the one that makes us say “how beautiful,” but the one that forces us to think: “this is true.”

And it is precisely in this recognition, however uncomfortable, that its inevitable necessity lies.