Keeping Up With Milano's Art: March 2024 Issue
Hello B&A people! The year is in full swing and there are many new shows being churned out by museums, galleries, and fluid art spaces alike – as always, almost too many to keep track of. We’ve seen a lot of photography so far this year, so this month I went looking for something more manual and craft-based. Also, in honour of women’s month, I thought I’d write a special one and dedicate this issue to the work of female-identifying artists.
A question we may rightly ask is why is this even necessary? Well, the relationship between the art world and female representation is a hot and contested topic in the contemporary scene. I’m sure this is something we are all acutely aware of but let me quantify the problem a little before seeing you off on this month’s female-centred art cruise.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT IF WOMEN CAN’T PENETRATE THE COMMERCIAL SPHERE, THEY WILL STRUGGLE TO ENTER INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURES AND BY EXTENSION THE COMPOSITION OF THE HISTORY OF ART
The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report of 2024 exposes the persistent underrepresentation of female artists by galleries which, despite incremental improvements, sits at 40%. Moreover, as of 2023, the work of female artists makes up only 39% of High-Net-Worth art collections across the globe. The problem (put very shortly and simply) is that if women can’t penetrate the commercial sphere, surpass the myriad of art world gatekeepers, and make their work visible through dealers and other channels, they will struggle to enter institutional structures and by extension the composition of the history of art. We are, however, witnessing some improvements. The 2022 Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani was practically revolutionary for its heavily female participation, at over 90%. Hoping that this current of change won’t calm anytime soon, let’s dive right into March’s selection of shows.
The true star of this month has to be Chiara Camoni, on show at the Pirelli HangarBicocca until the 21st of July. I admit Bicocca is a little far out of town, but trust me, this exhibition is absolutely worth the journey.
Exhibition View. Courtesy of Pirelli HangarBicocca.
Two stone lionesses guard the entrance of the exhibit titled Call and Gather. Sisters. Moths and Flame Twisters. Lioness Bones, Snakes and Stones. Facing each other in stoic elegance, the two sandy creatures, seemingly emerging out of solid rock before our eyes, recall the Great Sphinx of Giza or the lion gate of the ancient city of Mycenae, and become a portal into the anachronistic realm Camoni has brought to us. The artist’s production reveals her fascination with antiquity and archaeology, with much of her imagery drawing on Etruscan, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman traditions – entering her creative dimension really does feel like stepping into a remote history suspended in time, at once familiar and estranging.
Works across media of drawing, vegetable prints, video, sculpture and ceramics have been organized into a symmetrical arrangement within the gallery space to mimic the paths of a typical late Renaissance Italian garden. In fact, Camoni’s confident use of the floor enhances the works’ deep connection to the earth and the natural world, along with her intuitive manipulation of organic, perishable materials in her practice. In a return to and reinvention of traditions of craftmanship, the artist incorporates unusual elements such as herbs, berries, sand and ashes to her ceramic or wood sculptures to explore the innate agency of materials and achieve unexpected polychrome effects.
I was drawn to Camoni’s work because of this unique way of viewing the practice of art making, which usually is all about preserving for years to come, about fossilising people and objects into history. In contrast, her work invites us to embrace transformation: of the artworks, of ourselves, of the world around us.
Going on with our Easter-egg hunt for the work of women artists around Milan, let me suggest a small exhibition, hidden away in a quiet courtyard near Porta Venezia: She, The Cat’s Mother, a show dedicated to Lucy Stein at Galerie Gregor Staiger. When you get there, don’t be afraid to walk right through the residential building to reach the gallery – it seems private and out of bounds, but we’re very welcome to go and have a look. In fact, the secret-garden-esque feel of the place fits perfectly with the work of Stein, a multimedia artist from the UK whose production draws on nature, folklore, and mysticism.
Lucy Stein, Brigid, 2024. Hand painted ceramic bisque tiles. 62 x 62 cm. Photo: Flavia Dal Brollo
The exhibit features ten works, a new body conceived specifically for the gallery, which are iterations of Stein’s poetic relation with the natural environment around her. The true jewels of the show were for me the tile panels, influenced by the substantial time the artist spent in Eastern Spain since childhood. Stein’s practice adopts the famous azulejo tilework of this region and breathes into it a unique spirit, at once brutal and delicate.
The permanence of the tile medium – intended for exterior decoration – is juxtaposed by transient, mythic subjects belonging to oral narratives and pre-modern traditions. Specifically, Stein dialogues with global female mythologies, extracting and centring in her work powerful goddess figures of fertility, creation and destruction such as the Irish Brigid, the Roman Proserpina, and the Hindu Kali. These primordial patronesses interact with each other to unite into a singular divine force while simultaneously remaining distinct to evoke the existence of a plurality of female realities.
Detail of Underworlding (Proserpina), 2024. Hand painted ceramic bisque tiles. 62 x 77.5 cm. Photo: Flavia Dal Brollo
The artist presents us with a multifaceted view of femininity through her divine references, communicated in collage-like ensembles of textures and colours. Like Camoni, Stein places particular weight to the materiality of her work, choosing to use local Cornish minerals as glazes which, together with earthy and natural colour palettes, root the works into a murkily magical English landscape. I hope you’ll enjoy discovering her mystical visual allegories as much as I did.
Continuing with the thread of artists’ connections to their surrounding environment, I finally invite you all to visit Monica de Cardenas, a contemporary art gallery right next to Garibaldi station. Exhibited until the 4th of May are the harmonic abstract compositions of Chung Eun-Mo, a Korean painter who has lived in Italy since 1987. Her chromatic fields, animated by singing complementary colours, evoke places and spaces which she has experienced in her life.
Planes of colour mingle sensitively in her rectangular, circular, or irregularly-shaped mathematical formats to produce romantic architectural geometries which feel uncannily familiar and recall a strangely universal perspective. Building with the light and tones of both urban and rural scapes, she figures the fleeting sensations of warm sunsets falling onto green terrains, or the reassuring calm of gently illuminated interiors. Her work is touched by the confident use of shape and colour of great modernists like Kazimir Malevich and Josef Albers, but also by the deeply introspective explorations of Hilma af Klint, references which she digests and aligns to produce her own personal portals of memory.
Exhibition View. Courtesy of the artist and Monica de Cardenas Gallery.