The first room of the exhibition, located in the fully renovated East Exedra—transformed by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region within the ducal complex of Villa Manin—hosts, through four masterpieces, a true summary of the entire exhibition itinerary.
It is, in essence, an immense journey into the wonder of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, spanning both Europe and America.
The opening room is itself divided into two distinct sections.
In the first stands one of the greatest contemporary painters: Anselm Kiefer, representing the idea of a post-Van Gogh horizon, in the surpassing of a line along a road that becomes a boundless border.

A wholly different kind of border is that of the garden.
It is the place where boundaries become contemplation—an imagined enclosure that, through the sky, opens instead into the widest possible immensity.
There is no other garden in the history of art, except that of Claude Monet at Giverny, that so gently proclaims the alluring presence of what stretches to the utmost limit.
In this first room, a large canvas by Monet will recount the damask weave of irises and the miraculous pond of water lilies. Kiefer and Monet, side by side for this very reason: expansion and apparent withdrawal.

In the second section of the first room, it is the landscape that dominates.
Indeed, the geographic elements of sea, sky, and mountain represent in this exhibition the attainment that leads toward the borders of a space often aligned with the immense.
Thus, within this overview, one encounters one of the most beautiful versions of Gustave Courbet’s famous The Wave, alongside the union of mountains and sky in the work of a perhaps lesser-known yet marvelous artist: the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, active between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.