16/04/2013

Nikolas Gambaroff: Quality Interiors at Giò Marconi

During the weekend of the MiArt fair, the action didn’t only take place in Milan’s city fairground. Many of the city’s galleries also took the opportunity to open the doors to their newest exhibitions, and one of the most interesting ones turned out to be Nikolas Gambaroff’s Quality Interiors at Giò Marconi. The German-born, New York-based artist is presented with his first solo show in the gallery, including new works of polyester window film or silicon among a set of mannequins and one of his perhaps better-known newspaper paintings.


For Quality Interiors, with its title perhaps giving an ironic nod to the madness of last week’s Salone del Mobile, Gambaroff filled the three ground floor rooms of the gallery with lusciously pink works made of Polyethylene Terephthalate Window Film. Usually abbreviated PET, the film is normally used in synthetic fibers, food and liquid containers, or even film and solar cell technology. The specific type used by the artist is usually applied to the windows of commercial buildings to convert the sunlight into infrared radiation and reduce the energy flow. Treated in different ways and torn apart to reveal the back of the structure, Gambaroff’s works look fragile yet alluring, mirroring the visitors walking by. On wooden tables, the flat, wrinkly silicon works in nude pastel pink hues give more of a matt, tactile impression, as a reminiscence of human flesh.


The largest room includes a set of half-dressed mannequins, a collaboration between Gambaroff and Nina Yashar, the interior design priestess and founder of Milan’s Nilufar Gallery. Beautiful fabrics in tribal patterns are wrapped in unorthodox matters around the mannequins, mirrored in the shiny surface of the pink window film work. The mannequins become a constant audience in relation to the work, gazing in different directions in a play with different ways of seeing and being seen.

Bearing Gambaroff’s more well-known newspaper-based work in mind, Quality Interiors shines a new light on his artistic production. Still, the works revolve around the same themes as before, in a dissection, deconstruction and re-evaluation of what painting is today. Given the impressions in Giò Marconi, it’s a very human thing.


The exhibition is on view until May 18th 2013.

Helena Nilsson Strängberg – Image courtesy of the artist, Gió Marconi 
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16/07/2012

Markus Schinwald | Between Past And Future

Markus Schinwald | Between Past And Future

Feverish preparations for holidays are under way, and while most people are getting ready to leave the hot Milan, the ones still in the city could profit these last weeks to visit art exhibitions before their finissage waiting for the next season. Among the shows on view until the end of July, we chose to suggest you Old Wants – Young Desires by Salzburg-born artist Markus Schinwald (b. 1973) at gallery Giò Marconi.

Schinwald’s works rely on a trans-historical approach that mixes contemporary elements and ancient atmospheres leading back into the past, linking different periods to display the constriction of human bodies and their relation with the surrounding space.

Amelie, Grita, Berth, Jasper, Lukas or Pepe are just some of the characters depicted by the Austrian artist in his restored and manipulated paintings and vintage prints: faces of bourgeois ladies and gentlemen from the 19th century, who are being suffocated by curtains and scarves wrapped around their faces, men and women tricked up with chains, metal clamps, stripes and bandages that remind of weird pieces of jewelry and, at the same time, fetish objects and prosthesis.

Markus Schinwald’s small dark portraits are both macabre and freaky, though preserving the elegance, seriousness and above all composure of their hybrid creatures that puzzle and intrigue the viewers. Yes, because even if the weird tools initially cause uneasiness, they actually don’t seem to be hindrances for the perfectly self-controlled figures.

The altered body, its connections with the mind and space; the relation between inner and outer, conscious and unconscious call to mind the study of an artist’s renowned countryman, Sigmund Freud.

Beyond paintings and prints, the exhibition also presents three aquariums that interact with the gallery architecture. For this show, as already did at the 54th Venice Biennale, Markus Schinwald plays once again with the topic of “legs”, displaying sculptures of chair legs that remind dancers’ legs and, as an icing on the cake, a double projection of his famous film Orient.

Spending some time in a chilly and relaxed art gallery visiting a very high quality exhibition is definitely a good way to wait for summer holidays, don’t you think?

Old Wants – Young Desires will run until July 27th 2012.

Monica Lombardi

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