Miart Report: Artist Highlights 2023
Milan's latest efforts to revive interest in its local heritage has generated many crossovers with the contemporary art scene and a dynamic exhibition landscape. Ocula Magazine was on the ground at miart (14–16 April 2023) to bring you this year's highlights.
Kathleen Goncharov, Above and Beyond (2010) (detail). Pen and coloured pencil on panel. 40.6 x 40.6 x 2.5 cm. Courtesy Olympia.
Kathleen Goncharov at Olympia
Kathleen Goncharov's muted but captivating landscapes brightened Olympia's booth and the fair, inspiring wonder and reverence at times, and psychedelic dreamlands too.
For over four decades, the artist painted while pursuing a successful curatorial career, commissioning politically conscious work by artists such as Fred Wilson for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale.
While abstract, their historicity is evident. Goncharov has travelled to Italy since the mid-1980s, citing key influences from Giovanni di Paolo to Sano di Pietro and Venetian Renaissance painters.
Accordingly, her compositions retain the mysticism and grace known to Catholic worship scenes while abstracting their formal and stylistic elements to articulate the artist's subconscious mind.
The drawing Pink Sky (2023), for instance, depicts intersecting forms in reverie-inducing shades that appear to invoke divine apparitions—although the imaginative might read these as tangled intestines, elongated vulvas, and all-seeing eyes.
Noteworthy is the overall unity of Goncharov's compositions. The artist blends the edges to soften the colour transition between individual elements while creating a sense of balance amid movement. Distracting the eye from any single point, one is urged toward an overall feeling, rather than analysis of any single point.
Elsewhere, subtle shifts of light generate a sense of depth. Sloping forms and layered grounds hint at the Tuscan landscapes that inspired works on panel such as Above and Beyond (2010), where dissolving fluorescent forms evoke a psychedelic mediation.
Until recently, Goncharov considered her quieter works 'too vulnerable' for public collections. In Milan, they appear right at home.
Javier Barrios at CLEARING
Amid the clamour of art fairs, viewers eventually gravitate towards quieter presentations despite the initial attraction of an immersive booth or anything requiring a power socket.
At CLEARING's space, Javier Barrios' small pastel and sanguine drawings were a delightful find. Like illustrated pages carefully removed from an old picture book, these singular works detail mythological creatures with a soft hand in yellows and reds that recall desert landscapes and rituals of death from the artist's native Mexico.
Rooted inside the human body, grinning organisms inspired by Aztec skinning rituals in Bulbophyllums inframundo III (2023) nod to the recent pandemic, where disease and infection introduced a rather stark reality that is perhaps easier dealt with through metaphor and fiction.
A closer look at watercolours from the series 'Buddhist Vision in Hell' (2019–ongoing) reveals orchid-shaped bodies and veined organs given the comic and tragic expressions of Cantonese opera masks. Of a soft but fiery red, they recall tensions between human and natural orders, which threaten to dissolve fallible bodies through time and death.
This shift to a softer, more humane subject matter and intimate medium is rather recent for the artist, whose previous contemplations of 'utopia and human realities' exhibited the same matter-of-fact lines and cold edges of machinery and technology.
Barrios' venture into botany and mythology mirrors the widespread shift in conscience from the idealisation of industry and technological development as progress, as ecological disasters urge a greater sensitivity to the fragility of living organisms and return to ancestral roots.
Jim Lambie at Galleria Franco Noero
No one could have missed Jim Lambie's 18 Carrots (2023), shown previously in different versions, and sometimes as 14 Carrots. Doused with orange paint, which dripped from the platform, splattered the walls, and trailed along the patterned floor, amusement turns to appreciation upon a closer look, as viewers discover they are not plastic.
This unexpected sighting of life amid collectable objects echoes the essence of Lambie's punk-inspired practice, which often recalibrates the exhibition space with bright pulsating patterns that zigzag across the walls and floor like imploding chords from a guitar riff.
Lambie's fame as a musician and DJ inspired many visitor photos, but most remained oblivious to the artist's Turner Prize nomination in 2005. Tapping into the artist's musical roots, something irreverent about the work's gesture enlivened the fair as a place of conversation and exchange beyond the usual transactions.
Kenji Sugiyama at Primo Marella Gallery
Premised on a 'meta-viewing experience', Kenji Sugiyama's illusionary maquettes prompt a rethink of the immersive. Small in scale and devoid of LED lighting, two universes awaited the curious who peered into the glass displays outside Primo Marella Gallery's booth.
The serene but crammed interiors of Cell—Inside of Myself 2 and 4 (both 2022) are built within small spaces that appear to reach back approximately a metre. An ornate library reveals itself from this restricted visual field, with hundreds of books scattered and stacked along shelves.
Abundant detail commands attention—from the covers of individual tomes to asymmetries between columns and arches and unruly shelves. Under soft light, the process of looking slows down, replicating the experience of sinking into a good book or getting lost in conversation.
Sugiyama describes his installations as containers for memory which unfold through his work like layers of a Russian doll: thoughts and experiences filed inside volumes accessed only within the self-contained space recall mental landscapes we can never fully articulate.
The eye gravitates toward the back yet remains unable to distinguish the exact boundaries of the artist's illusionary space. Something intimate and expansive unfolds, recalling the nature of thought itself, reaching out to be shared, yet self-contained.
Shafei Xia at P420
Pastel-shaded and glazed, Shafei Xia's peculiar ceramic The dress table (2023) provoked much intrigue, even among those who have trouble appreciating the jarring Orientalism and beastiality illustrated in her watercolours.
Xia's works on paper recall contemporary versions of Japanese shunga and Chinese erotic painting and emphasise this association through the medium of watercolour and the use of sandalwood paper, which replicates the grainy surface of woodblock prints.
In The dress table, a mirror at the centre reflects a recurring motif in Xia's work—a partially nude Asiatic woman in a Victorian dress is held in a tiger's embrace.
The work's soft-handed application of purples and pinks, nodding to femininity and innocence, contrast with the ceramic ephemera scattered above—a small pig inside a rooster-shaped bathtub, a pair of breasts served on a plate, a severed rabbit head—critiquing rather than exploiting the aesthetic of orientalism and female sexuality.
In the kitsch forms of her discoloured ceramics, recalling objects from an elderly aunt's attic, Xia appears to acknowledge the outdated nature of provocation through nudity.
Like many artists, Xia's work becomes a means to channel an 'active energy', but not at the cost of decades of resistance. As Xia states in the exhibition text for P420: 'I am the tiger, but I am also the orchestra conductor who creates problems. To break the boredom.'
Peter Shire at Galleria Luisa delle Piane
Peter Shire's industrial sculptures recall the spirit of Milan's art week, where art collides with design, and craft is not devoid of intrigue.
Shire's approach to design is best explained by the hazardous aesthetic that defines the Memphis Group, an Italian design and architecture collective whose bold hues and odd arrangements of shapes have continuously offended the functionally inclined.
Presented along a forest-green counter overseen by avian sculptures constructed from metal sheets, Shire's ceramic teapots nod to the onset of the industrial age, suggesting something has died alongside the productive ambitions of modernity (could it be aesthetic sensibilities?).
While not immediately recognisable as containers for tea, they are oddly harmonious in tone and shape for objects assembled from circular and rectangular prisms and given peculiar metallic accents in the form of antennas and railings.
The vessel-shaped Hanger Tanker (2003), for instance, flaunts the top hat of an industrialist, while graphite illustrations on both sides depict smoke-infused skies where robots and hot-air balloons overlook residential homes that have been blasted away.
Andrei Pokrovskii at RIBOT Gallery
Past an elaborate oil-on-canvas presentation by Bénédicte Peyrat, whose unsettling sitters contest traditional painting and beauty conventions as their asymmetries find emphasis amid pastel-toned plein-air settings, was an unexpected discovery.
Andrei Pokrovskii's Liquid Song (2022) is a mid-century evening scene submerged under night vision. From an ornate carriage, a woman in elaborate dress steps out, her darkened eyes sight the painter. Lantern sleeves peek out from the second-storey window on her left to greet the arrival.
We seem to have walked into a moment in time where reality meets fantasy. Sharp lines ground the carriage and building in representation, contrasting with textured shading in ghostly blacks and greens, which create an eerie atmosphere that transports viewers away.
Pokrovskii conveys the contextuality of place with tones and hues selected to generate at once a sense of temporality and its absence. In Major Archive (2022), burnt oranges and dusty yellows illustrate a circus scene under a candle-lit tent at night, while Ticket Booth and Help Yourself (2023) depicts a blood-orange booth manned by a faceless mannequin under a dark whirling sky. In both, the artist's otherworldly colour palette evokes distant fantasies frozen in space. —[O]
