Three large canvases, hung from the ceiling on metal slats, created a virtual space within the real space of the gallery. They were made of polyester—light, almost immaterial, translucent—and enabled viewers to see each other walking about the space: Even the slightest breath of air moved the diaphanous partitions. Onto these large fields Igor Eškinja has printed photographs mostly shot in Rijeka, the city in Croatia where he lives. Depicted are large, anonymous apartment blocks, devoid of any aesthetic value, built in the early 1970s in anticipation of the city’s industrial development,

Paolo Cotani (1940–2011) first gained acclaim in the 1970s as one of the protagonists of Pittura Analitica (Analytical Painting). This movement, particularly in Italy, France, and Germany, aimed to scrutinize painting’s social issues, psychological motives, and linguistic effects. At that time, painting was seen as an obsolete expressive tool, under attack by Arte Povera and a younger generation of conceptually minded artists. Cotani superimposed monochromatic bands of colored fabric in a quest for a painting that resisted the medium’s conventions while using a recognizable, even canonic, form.

After a long, fruitful period in Bergamo, Italy, that began in 1971, the Galleria Fumagalli moved to Milan in 2011. This year the gallery moved again—though it remains in the same city—and opened its new venue with this show, “Enrico Castellani, Robert Mangold, Robert Morris, Kenneth Noland: A Personal View of Abstract Painting and Sculpture.” The main intention of the exhibition, organized by independent curator Hayden Dunbar, was to compare these four artists in relation to themes such as the redefinition of the artwork and its surface as objective and phenomenal realities, and the