Aliya Say

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  picks February 23, 2022

  Renato Leotta

  The title of Renato Leotta’s first exhibition at London’s Sprovieri gallery, “Linea, Punto.,” enacts one of the show’s key themes: the movement toward stillness. The colored textiles and black-and-white photograms evoke nonhuman gestures and temporalities in their muted dynamics, capturing the shapes and patterns of waves, minerals, and planetary movements.

  The focal point of the show are seven works from the series “Multiverso” (Multiverse), 2019-2021. Leotta made these elemental “paintings” by dipping rectangular cuts of dyed cotton into the sea and then leaving them to dry. A single salt line

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  picks September 22, 2021

  Jakob Rowlinson

  Jakob Rowlinson’s exhibition “Visions of a Whispered Past” transports viewers to a bucolic setting with two statement walls in shades of fern and forest green that tap into the divine powers of fecundity, renewal, and healing. Through his research into medieval queer ecologies—leaning particularly on twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s concept of Viriditas, the greening green—Rowlinson attempts to subvert the certainties of historical and biological narratives, such as those that portray queerness as “unnatural.” In the postmedieval marginalia of his textile and felt wall hangings and

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  picks August 30, 2021

  Zadie Xa

  Zadie Xa’s exhibition here is a visual and oral fable, a myth. The story, which the artist tells in a non-linear fashion through paintings, installation, and modulated light, is inspired by Korean shamanic culture. The show’s central installation features Xa’s signature textile patchwork as ritualistic garments, as well as quirky sculptures made in collaboration with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo, including ceramic shoes in animal and vegetable shapes. Its accompanying audio invites the audience to close their eyes and follow the multi-faceted, multispecies narrator as they take us through a

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  picks December 28, 2020

  Flavie Audi

  3-D-printed and hand-finished, Flavie Audi’s sculptures, tables, and reliefs are arranged within the enormous rectangular space of the Italian art and design gallery Nilufar Depot with the musical precision of Malevich’s Suprematist compositions. This seemingly arbitrary art-historical association is reinforced when viewing the show from the side galleries fifteen meters above, its cosmic geometry ostensibly governed by laws both material and metaphysical. The crevices and acclivities of Audi’s glass, resin, and bronze forms appear as distant as MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1 yet as familiar as