print December 2019

Maria Lai

On the centenary of Maria Lai’s birth, this exhibition groups more than two hundred of the artist’s works, most seen for the first time, into sections organized around ideas such as mending, storytelling, playing, disseminating, and encountering. Often considered isolated, though by no means an unknown artist, Lai received a surge of international attention in 2017, five years after her death, when her work was included in both the Venice Biennale and Documenta. Curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Luigia Lonardelli in collaboration with the Archivio Maria Lai and the Fondazione Stazione

print September 2019

Haris Epaminonda

In the last room of Haris Epaminonda’s exhibition “VOL. XXVI,” which opened this past April, a few weeks before the artist won a Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, viewers found themselves facing the enigma of Untitled #15 t/g (all works 2019). A small vase and a slender metal structure were set atop a rectangular swath of gilded paper. A single palm leaf fluttered down from one of the metal bars. A few feet away, a white stucco panel leaned against the wall. Jutting from behind it was a snippet of an illustration from an old atlas, showing a young woman twirling on a swing on a red-figure

print April 2019

Federico Tosi

Propelled by an imagination poised between tragedy and pulp fiction, Federico Tosi’s exhibition “Goodbye bye bye” proposed a journey through both space and time: not only from the immensity of the cosmos to the most profound depths of the sea, but also through the history of evolution. In the gallery’s first room, the starting point was the universe itself, which exploded in a myriad of stars and galaxies in four large drawings executed in felt-tip pen on paper. The deep blue-black of the cosmos was illuminated by flashes of indigo, red, and yellow, and was made vibrant by a dense, swarming

picks March 25, 2019

Gal Weinstein

Can you engage in a political discourse through matter? With the eighteen new works that make up the exhibition “Echo,” Gal Weinstein continues to demonstrate the refined metaphorical power that material can assume. By layering fabrics, such as felt, with bronze or steel wool, plaster, vinegar, and silicon carbide, the artist creates an interaction of elements that corrodes or unexpectedly changes the materials’ surfaces. In Untitled, 2019, felt and steel and bronze wool—suggesting both mold and organic vitality—have been used to cover four large plywood panels in fine, expressionistic lines.

print March 2019

Bruno Munari

In the 1930s, Bruno Munari (1907–1998) experimented with ceramics in Tullio Mazzotti’s avant-garde workshop in Albisola, in the northwest of Italy. In his small ceramic Bulldog, 1934, curvilinear planes form the figure of an animal toy both tender and surprising, exemplifying the ironic air that runs through the practice of this artist-designer, who joined the second wave of Futurism in the late ’20s. Bulldog—the earliest work in this exhibition, “Ognuno vede ciò che sa” (Everyone Sees What They Know)—already reveals Munari’s wedding of methodological logic to imaginative freedom. His attachment

picks December 03, 2018

Lala Meredith-Vula

Lala Meredith-Vula’s haystacks seem to share a certain rustic heroism with those of Jean-François Millet, though they do not reflect sunlight like Claude Monet’s. Meredith-Vula has been photographing and creating an archive of these rural structures since 1989, a typological investigation into seriality and aesthetic-formal variety within a family of objects that brings to mind the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. In this show, curated by Monika Szewczyk, the series is represented by eleven photographs. Each image emphasizes the three-dimensional, sculptural presence and individuality of each

picks November 02, 2018

Claudio Verna

Claudio Verna’s “Pittura Analitica” (Analytical Painting) does not fall into place all at once. His canvases require a deciphering of their essential elements, modulated and distributed in different ways, which form the basis of pictorial language: form, color, line, material, and light. This small retrospective of eleven large-scale paintings, which spans 1967 to 2016 and is based on the rhythm of whiteness in his work, reveals the artist’s playful attitude toward monochrome, which he embraces and thwarts, often in the same canvas. The most recent work in the show, Inatteso (Unexpected), 2016,

print October 2018

Aldo Tagliaferro

In a note concerning his work Identificazione in una variabilità oggettiva temporale (Identification in an Objective Temporal Variability), 1973, Aldo Tagliaferro writes, “Two moments exist as components in the structure of the work. One is direct and objective, fixed by a date. The other is indirect and subjective in the sense of memory and the identification of a subjectively ideal reality . . . attaining the point of verification when the ideal reality is no longer our (real) reality.” The central piece in this exhibition and the resulting cycle of works, Memoria—Identificazione—in

print Summer 2018

Laura Grisi

Laura Grisi had her last solo show in 1995, having exhibited with the likes of Leo Castelli and Konrad Fischer since the mid-1960s. “Hypothesis on Infinity,” a fine-tuned exhibition of seven works dated from between 1966 and 1981, casts new light on the complex work of this now somewhat overlooked artist, who passed away last year at the age of seventy-eight. Avoiding any one category, her reflective and poetic art is rooted in a personal and singular interpretation of Pop and kinetic art, expanding toward conceptual and process-related ways of working.

The earliest work on view here is Seascape

print May 2018

Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli

It is not easy to face the questions posed by Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli’s latest documentary film, which he created in collaboration with director and philosophy researcher Federico Lodoli. Frammento 53 (Fragment 53) (2015) is uncomfortable not because it confronts the subject of war, but because of the interpretation and method Tribbioli has chosen. The filmwas the core of the exhibition “Intorno l’altare di un dio sconosciuto” (Toward the Altar of a God Unknown), which consisted of three other parts, developed from research materials the artist collected with Lodoli for the film: eight portraits

picks March 26, 2018

Marta Sforni

In the five paintings here that are part of “Mirror Fenice,” 2016–, a series that floats between abstraction and figuration, Marta Sforni returns to the subject of her series “Green Mirror,” 2015, which is also featured in this exhibition. In both projects, each work’s surface, built up through glazes of green or red oil paint, depicts a frame belonging to a large baroque mirror that appears to be shattering. The painted surface resembles a reflective glass, only it betrays no interior or person. Instead it becomes a threshold that leads the viewer into depths in which phantasms, memories, and

picks March 22, 2018

Tobias Zielony

“Maskirovka,” which means “mask” or “concealment” in Ukranian, is the title of a series Tobias Zielony created between 2016 and 2017 in Kiev. Here, the word refers to both military camouflage and the daily practice of many young people in the Ukrainian capital’s queer scene. The term likewise indicates Russian policy in Ukraine.

This exhibition consists of one film, one video, a slideshow, and a series of photographs. Also titled Maskirovka, 2018, the stop-motion video constructs a syncopated narration, alternating between images of public demonstrations and military assaults—references to the

Alessandra Pioselli