Analisa Teachworth - Threshold, zaza’ Milano

“I just didn’t want to be held back by anything like that. That’s why I’ve been investigating different media across the spectrum of art.”

Analisa Teachworth, zaza’ Milan, Installation View. Photography credits: Agnese Bedini, DSL Studio. Courtesy of the artist and zaza’.

Last week, B&A visited “Threshold”, the recently inaugurated exhibition at zaza’ Milano. The fresh artistic entity with a twin site in Naples entered the Milanese art scene only two years ago with a curatorial programme focused on queer artists and practices. The new show is the first solo exposition at the gallery of multidisciplinary artist Analisa Teachworth, who works between New York and Berlin, and who dedicated some time to tell us about her work and answer some of our questions.

Threshold – subtly capturing Teachworth’s borderless practice which traverses painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and digital media –juxtaposes two distinct yet interconnected bodies of work: a series of esoteric encaustic wax paintings and a fractured glass installation, each exploring the delicate mingling and paradoxical harmony of fragility and brutality, gentleness and frenzy. This play of opposites recurs in Teachworth’s oeuvre, certainly thematically, but most evidently in terms of materiality. Comfortable with a range of media, Teachworth uses natural and organic substances alongside produced and found materials in her work. Indeed, in a practice driven by a confidence in experimentation and a fluency in the language of various disciplines, her materials assume a great significance and become portals of meanings, realities, and emotion.

Analisa Teachworth, Filter 1 & 2, 2022. Beeswax on canvas. 180 x 125 cm (each). Photography credits: Agnese Bedini, DSL Studio. Courtesy of the artist and zaza’.

Evoking weather patterns, geological formations, or something more visceral, Teachworth’s wax paintings are, in her own words, painted from her total imagination. “What I do in the studio is I close my eyes and I imagine landscapes, I go there internally” she expresses, describing how her practice is rooted in a manifestation of dream-like visions rather than informed by tangible references. The opaque, abstracted landscapes are executed in beeswax through the traditional technique of encaustic, a form of painting involving the mixture of pigments with hot liquid wax. Teachworth explains that not all encaustic paintings are made with beeswax, and that her choice of this organic binder was influenced by her experiences working in the agricultural sphere alongside farmers.

Caption: Analisa Teachworth, Fall from us (detail), 2023. Photography credits: Agnese Bedini, DSL Studio. Courtesy of the artist and zaza’.

Exposed to the material and fascinated by its flexibility and potential, the artist began first to sculpt and then to paint with it. Beyond the evident return to the natural in both material and subject matter, the fast-drying properties of beeswax demand an intuitive and gestural process that is recorded in Teachworth’s highly tactile surfaces and exudes an alchemical, transformative quality. Her paintings remember and accumulate gesture and action, a property that reflects Teachworth’s love of film and the moving image and her intent to capture pace, motion and energy in her work. The result is a collection of layered, fluid compositions that hover upon the threshold of solidity and movement, much like the melting medium of wax itself. However, Teachworth stresses that her peculiar and fascinating technique is not the central element of her work. Her focus is rather connected to a generative idea of narrative, of a vast and open land which viewers might be able to step into, mentally and emotively, and find the chance to “just feel something”.

Caption: Analisa Teachworth, Alter 1 – Fragment, 2025. Steel structure, safety glass. 162 x 150 x 3 cm. Photography credits: Agnese Bedini, DSL Studio. Courtesy of the artist and zaza’.

The artist’s exploration of the potential of texture and material to evoke an interior state is reflected also in the crackling pane of Teachworth’s glass installation, precariously balanced on the wall of the gallery. The singular glass sculpture, a fragment from a larger series titled Alter 1, speaks to fragility and transformation, with its delicate yet disrupted form prompting reflections on protection, separation, and destruction.

“I’m trying to see this energetic register, to see how soft or how hard something can be.” 

In contrast to the softness of the beeswax, these installations carry an intentional brutality. Teachworth shatters the material herself, testing its limits. “I’m trying to see this energetic register, to see how soft or how hard something can be,” she says. The tension between the two materials – one pliable, the other brittle – adds to the exhibition’s immersive quality, drawing visitors into a space of dualities: fragility and force, materiality and ephemerality.

Analisa Teachworth, zaza’ Milan, Installation View. Photography credits: Agnese Bedini, DSL Studio. Courtesy of the artist and zaza’.

During the visit to zaza’, our collective conversation led us to a discussion of what it means to work in contemporary art today and the difficulties that many artists have to contend with when trying to “make it” in the creative industry. Teachworth candidly and frankly spoke to us of the financial, emotional and existential obstacles that directly affect the practices of artists, as well as the long road to overcoming them. From a practical point of view, Teachworth’s move from a small studio in New York to a more expansive space in Berlin was instrumental in physically facilitating the evolution of her work. “It’s kind of a snake that grows to the size of its box… sometimes we have more artistic room to change scale,” she notes, acknowledging how environment undeniably shapes creativity and dictates the opportunities that artists can pursue. Along with studio space, the resources that artists have access to also affect their ability to store their artistic output. Teachworth mentions that her initial lack of physical space in part influenced her turn towards digital production, which provided both a new channel to freely experiment and mediate her ideas, and a dimension which promised a relatively unlimited and affordable storage space. Such scarcity of space, resources and support is a condition that many contemporary artists experience and battle with, and one that – if you fancy a curiously surreal read – the UK-based collective The White Pube explore truthfully and humorously at the intersection of fact and fiction in their book ‘Poor Artists’. 

Ultimately, Teachworth shares her belief that in art and in life we only grow thanks to the networks that we are able to build, the connections with people that we are able to forge. Threshold constructs just this, a space where emotion runs free, inter-personal and inter-material relations are encouraged, and perception itself is questioned. The exhibition lingers, leaving behind a sense of movement, of things in flux, of ideas not quite settled but all the more compelling and undeniably alive because of it. 

Threshold will be open at zaza’ Milano until the 22nd of March. Visit while you can!