EMERGENT

Gianni Manhattan, Vienna

Marina Faust (1950, Vienna) lives and works in Vienna and Paris.

Marina Faust began working at the age of eighteen as a photographer in Vienna, collaborating with Magnum Photos and Maison Martin Margiela. Her career as visual artist started after 1990s, when she began to investigate a wider range of media.
The works presented at miart 2018 are a significant example of her exquisite taste and charm, as well as her experimentation with materials. Stickers representing different parts of the body have been re-assembled on the same surface and then printed on silk tissue paper, creating delicate yet mysterious portraits exploring notions of human identity and fragility.

Marina Faust, “Makes Pilot Blush”, 2017 Inkjet print on silk tissue paper, matt paper, artist frame 84 x 109 cm Unique

 

 

Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna

Angelika Loderer (1984, Feldbach, Austria) lives and works in Vienna.

She studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, at Wimbledon College of Art, London as well as at Hendrix College, Arkansas, USA.
Angelika Loderer’s sculptures might be classified as media-reflective art: the characteristics of the materials she uses and the manufacturing processes are fundamental parameters informing the design process. Her sculptures are frequently made of cast metal or secondary materials from the metal casting workshop—wax, for example, or special molding sand, which, because of its high level of form stability, is particularly well suited for casting. It is essential for the production of the mould proper but leaves no trace on the finished product—it is effectively invisible. Loderer makes this auxiliary agent her medium to “build” fragile and temporary sculptures; consisting of molding sand, they allude to metalworking while also initiating an inspiring and paradoxical dialogue between the durability of the one and the ephemeral quality of the other. Her creative approach is characterised by the improvisational and experimental uses she makes of her materials: unconventional combinations yield appealing objects that sometimes suggest a sort of “performative sculpture.”

 

 

 

Clima, Milan

Valerio Nicolai (1988, Gorizia, Italy) lives and works in Turin.

Particularly interested in the subject, its concreteness, existence in form, the origin and eventual transformation, Valerio Nicolai’s approach strives to abstract it from its traditional purpose. He pays the most attention on gesture, the compound of materials, their chemical and physical effect. Taking an introspective discourse, his method alienates the sense of belonging and the essential meaning of a gesture. The material he uses already contain its own story and his artworks emerge as the result of an exchange of questions and answers between the artist and his creation. Nicolai’s main focus is on touch, gesture and movement and the work of art itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Gallleriapiù, Bologna

Ann Hirsch (1985, Baltimore, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles.

She holds a MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University and a BFA in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis. In her work the social norms and the way they affect our understanding and our use and abuse of the body are a central theme of reflection and critique.
In the coloured-pencil-on-paper drawings, part of the Iceberg series, inspired by Freud’s famous quote, “The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water,” the artist employs the form of an iceberg as a formal motif extending between each drawing. What changes is the array of surreal, cartoon-like scenes populating the bulk of the iceberg that lies below water. In each work, the viewer is presented at once both comical and disturbing imagery representing the artist’s unconscious anxieties and desires.

Ann Hirsch, “The Dog” (Iceberg series), 2017 Gouache and coloured pencils on paper, ash frame 118 x 88 cm

 

 

 

Horizont, Budapest

Klára Hosnedlová (1990, Prague) and Igor Hosnedl (1988, Prague) both graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where they studied under Vladimir Skrepl and Jiri Kovanda.

The duo works together and lives in Berlin. Klára explores notions of the body, mapping the aesthetics of gymnastic exercises, photographic studies of the individual exercise elements and imprinting them under the form of a final installation. Igor has been testing two kinds of approach to drawing in his works, both as a source of imagination, and as a plan, an instruction or a technical record. While communicating with Klara and her work, the aim is to inhabit the space with specific accessories of artistic and technical characters. For miart 2018, the objective is to respond to the theme of the human body movement, which involves aesthetic qualities even when the movement concerns activities for health or specific sportive purposes.

 

 

 

CONTEMPORARY

 

 

Emalin, London

For the gallery’s 2018 participation in miart, Emalin collaborated with British artist Giles Round (1976, London, UK) to create a quintessentially Milanese backdrop for the group presentation of gallery artists. Round draws on the the work of Italian architect Aldo Rossi to fashion a mise en scène for his own sculptures as well as works by Kembra Pfahler (1961, Hermosa Beach, CA, USA), Nicholas Cheveldave (1984, Victoria, Canada), Megan Plunkett (1985, Pasadena, CA, USA) and Athena Papadopoulos (1988, Toronto, Canada). A marbled wallpaper grounds the works on display – recalling the marble flooring often encountered in cemeteries or Milanese butcher shops – resulting in immersive and thought-provoking viewer experiences.

 

 

 

Francesca Minini, Milan

Alice Ronchi (1989, Milan, Italy) lives and works Milan.

Alice Ronchi studied at Residency VSC (Vermont), at Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) and at NABA (Milan). Her narrative style is powerful and delicate at the same time. Ronchi plays with the theme of dichotomy, by creating sculptures that invoke the monumental forms and archetypes of liturgical architecture, transforming the paradigms of architecture into profound emotions. Through their dimensions the sculptures become the reflection of those who look at them, their power is communicated through the use of precious materials – onyx, basalt, and marble – which, used on a human scale, take on new symbolic values.

For miart 2018, Alice Ronchi presents Per la barba di Merlino (vetrina) (2017), an installation composed by 25 combs of different materials (onyx, resin, glass, bronze): some are unique pieces, other are editions of three and each comb can be bought separately from the installation.

 

 

 

Federica Schiavo Gallery, Milan – Rome

Nicholas Byrne (1979, Oldham, UK) lives and works in London.

Nicholas Byrne creates painting compositions incorporating the stopping and reactivation of flows or fluxes, both representational and material. The works reverse-engineer images by a technical invocation of traditional painting. Curves, spirals, and loops recur in dynamic forms, leading the gaze to the surface. Occasionally, where uniform planes of colour impose themselves across the surface they don’t allow the eye to rest. Rather than providing a ground, planes of pure colour serve to obscure or colour-match forms and thus agitate perception.

His series called Celts is presented at miart 2018. It consists of a knotty triptych of gessoed panels. Made up close, in an exercise of scanning from left to right and back again. By taking care of how individual shake touch each other. A mood of compression, by force, occurs in muscular cliques on lines meeting.

 

 

 

 

Monitor, Rome and Lisbon

Thomas Braida (1982, Gorizia, Italy) lives and works in Venice.

Having studied at the Arts Academy of Venice, Thomas Braida’s practice belongs to the tradition of figurative painting. With his learned style of painting, he depicts reality and imagination, beauty and atrocity, mystery and humor. His subjects are a mix of mythology, symbolism and personal memories. The public looking at his works is involved in a journey of introspection and research.

Here is the way he defines his own idea of reproduction of reality: “You absorb reality, the world around us, and you experience it and feel it. Then, when you need to convey it through painting, it becomes a violent gesture, in the sense that it has to be like that because it reveals the world to us with great power – pondered, instinctive, arrogant – that breaks rules and the order with which we perceive the world- And it changes it into something else. Sometimes, even something new.”

 

 

 

P420, Bologna

June Crespo (1982, Pamplona) lives and works in Bilbao and Amsterdam.

June Crespo’s work does not come from simple intuition, but from a methodological strategy by which she produces forms and combines them, revealing a tension between the elements. Crespo’s work operates on the borders of art and language, in which she hints at a series of references to popular culture but intentionally cuts them short before they can enunciate something. For miart 2018, P420 shows her sculptures evoking corporal sensations. There is a dialectical relationship between the fortuitous, timid forms that result from experimentation with new techniques, and the memory embedded in the accumulation of practice.

June Crespo, “The same heat (poppy)”, 2018, Concrete, pigments, jumper 46 x 51.5 x 25 cm

 

 

 

Rodeo, London

Christodoulos Panayiotou (1978, Limassol, Cyprus) lives and works in Limassol, CY and Paris.

Panayiotou is an artist whose wide-ranging research focuses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives in the visual records of history and time. His visual neat aesthetics come from its connection with dance. He recently created a site-specific installation for the Centre Pompidou (Paris), choreographing the performance of The Death of Nikiya from the ballet La Bayadère within the exhibition space. A classically-trained dancer himself, Panayiotou is interested in the mode of transmission of this impermanent art form that survives only in being communicated from one body to another. For miart 2018, the two presented abstract works have been realised with pigments derived from euros notes: a political gesture with an aesthetic result.