Exhibitions
Catalogue Raisonnés—Christina Walsh
Philo-Poem
MADS Milano Exhibition, Milan, Italy 2021
International Contemporary Art exhibition
May 21, 2021
Concept edited by Vanessa Viti, graduated in Visual Arts and Art Curator.
“I am going to sing to the Earth, universal Mother with solid foundations, venerable old woman, who nourishes what is on the surface of it. From you comes fecundity and fertility, O Sovereign !,and it is from you to give and take life from mortal men. Blessed is he to whom you, kindly, honor;he has everything in abundance ... august goddess, generous divinity! Hello, Mother of the Gods, spouse of the starry sky! Grant me a happy life as a reward for my singing!From now on I will remember you in the remaining songs.”
(Homeric Hymn)
What would man be without the ability to think and ask questions? The most ancient civilizations have given us a gift, not only of answers, but also of wonderful stories in which to be able to discover the mysteries of the world. In ancient Greece it was said that at the beginning of time there was only darkness, a sort of black hole, which the Greeks called Chaos: an endless abyss where nothing is defined and where the concept of order does not exist. From the Chaos emerges Gaia, or Mother Earth, she is a distinct, solid, visible and tangible form. Gaia represents the primordial idea of cosmic order and balance. It will be Gaia herself to generate Uranus, the sky, creating the first principle of absolute balance, a sort of double that stands out above her and completes her. The concept of Mother Earth belongs to many ancestral mythologies; different peoples, in different places, with different names have revered the parent of every living being: Gaia for the Greeks, Tellus for the Romans, Joro for the Norsemen. To incarnate the archetype of the divine, in the most ancient cultures, it is always a female being, since it represents the mystery of birth. If on the one hand the divinity of Gaia has been honored, venerated and invoked through pagan rites, there are few artistic works dedicated to her and that have come down to us, after all -from the Middle Ages onwards- artists have turned their look to Christian representations. Somehow it will be Gustave Courbet in 1866 to remind us that "the origin" is a feminine noun, when he represents in an impeccable way the vulva of a woman and entitled the work "The origin of the world". This is the time to pay homage to Gaia, bypassing territorial, cultural and religious limits and borders, because we belong to Mother Earth, we owe our life to her, and we will return to her at the fulfillment of our days. Life and death merge into a single mystery, opposites that find balance in the depiction of Gaia, as the one who gives life at the same time welcomes the death of her children in her own womb. "She gives and she takes, She rules until the end of time, She goes her own way", it is with these words that the band Within Temptation speaks of Mother Earth, in the song of the same name. Gaia walks her path freely, every living being instead seeks that same path -because as much as history and contemporary life distance us from her- we cannot escape the indissoluble bond that exists between us and Mother Earth. The artist's role is to evoke emotions and memories; through the production of works of art he is called to dig into the most intimate and ancestral memory. The time to pay homage to Gaia is ripe, the right way to reunite and consolidate the connection with her is precisely art. Artists of all times have shaken souls and thoughts, they have moved peoples and cultures, now is the time to recall primordial memories in people and to invoke Gaia. If Mnemosine (or memory) is the daughter of Gaia, art is in some way the daughter of Mnemosine because it has always been the first tool used to preserve memory itself. The "Gaia: The Origin" exhibition aims to retrace history through a series of works, both figurative and abstract, and to bring back sleeping or hidden feelings, intimate and perhaps forgotten emotions. As Gaia represents a sort of splendor, so it wants to be the exhibition promoted by M.A.D.S.: a glow that makes thoughts and emotions explode. With this project M.A.D.S. asks artists to arm themselves with creative ingenuity, to find the right colors, get rid of any iconographic scheme to give life to new and infinite representations of Gaia.Gaia The Origin Collection
MADS Milano Exhibition, Milan, Italy 2021
International Contemporary Art exhibition
March, 26 - April, 4 2021
Concept edited by Vanessa Viti, graduated in Visual Arts and Art Curator.
“I am going to sing to the Earth, universal Mother with solid foundations, venerable old woman, who nourishes what is on the surface of it. From you comes fecundity and fertility, O Sovereign !,and it is from you to give and take life from mortal men. Blessed is he to whom you, kindly, honor;he has everything in abundance ... august goddess, generous divinity! Hello, Mother of the Gods, spouse of the starry sky! Grant me a happy life as a reward for my singing!From now on I will remember you in the remaining songs.”
(Homeric Hymn)
What would man be without the ability to think and ask questions? The most ancient civilizations have given us a gift, not only of answers, but also of wonderful stories in which to be able to discover the mysteries of the world. In ancient Greece it was said that at the beginning of time there was only darkness, a sort of black hole, which the Greeks called Chaos: an endless abyss where nothing is defined and where the concept of order does not exist. From the Chaos emerges Gaia, or Mother Earth, she is a distinct, solid, visible and tangible form. Gaia represents the primordial idea of cosmic order and balance. It will be Gaia herself to generate Uranus, the sky, creating the first principle of absolute balance, a sort of double that stands out above her and completes her. The concept of Mother Earth belongs to many ancestral mythologies; different peoples, in different places, with different names have revered the parent of every living being: Gaia for the Greeks, Tellus for the Romans, Joro for the Norsemen. To incarnate the archetype of the divine, in the most ancient cultures, it is always a female being, since it represents the mystery of birth. If on the one hand the divinity of Gaia has been honored, venerated and invoked through pagan rites, there are few artistic works dedicated to her and that have come down to us, after all -from the Middle Ages onwards- artists have turned their look to Christian representations. Somehow it will be Gustave Courbet in 1866 to remind us that "the origin" is a feminine noun, when he represents in an impeccable way the vulva of a woman and entitled the work "The origin of the world". This is the time to pay homage to Gaia, bypassing territorial, cultural and religious limits and borders, because we belong to Mother Earth, we owe our life to her, and we will return to her at the fulfillment of our days. Life and death merge into a single mystery, opposites that find balance in the depiction of Gaia, as the one who gives life at the same time welcomes the death of her children in her own womb. "She gives and she takes, She rules until the end of time, She goes her own way", it is with these words that the band Within Temptation speaks of Mother Earth, in the song of the same name. Gaia walks her path freely, every living being instead seeks that same path -because as much as history and contemporary life distance us from her- we cannot escape the indissoluble bond that exists between us and Mother Earth. The artist's role is to evoke emotions and memories; through the production of works of art he is called to dig into the most intimate and ancestral memory. The time to pay homage to Gaia is ripe, the right way to reunite and consolidate the connection with her is precisely art. Artists of all times have shaken souls and thoughts, they have moved peoples and cultures, now is the time to recall primordial memories in people and to invoke Gaia. If Mnemosine (or memory) is the daughter of Gaia, art is in some way the daughter of Mnemosine because it has always been the first tool used to preserve memory itself. The "Gaia: The Origin" exhibition aims to retrace history through a series of works, both figurative and abstract, and to bring back sleeping or hidden feelings, intimate and perhaps forgotten emotions. As Gaia represents a sort of splendor, so it wants to be the exhibition promoted by M.A.D.S.: a glow that makes thoughts and emotions explode. With this project M.A.D.S. asks artists to arm themselves with creative ingenuity, to find the right colors, get rid of any iconographic scheme to give life to new and infinite representations of Gaia.Love My Body Collection
MADS Milano Exhibition, Milan, Italy 2021
LOVE MY BODY 2021
we need different eyes
International Contemporary Art exhibition
Concept edited by Art Curators
Camilla Gilardi – graduated in Cultural Heritage Sciences, Master in Art, design, cultural enterprises
Silvia Grassi – graduated in History and Art Criticism
“Fresh eyes are needed, free from any prejudice. Fortunately, art has a great gift, that of being inexhaustible. It's anever-ending process, in which you never stop learning.”
(Fernando Botero)
Freedom of expression represents a fundamental and unequalled right, a conquest that man, and even more the female gender, has won after countless conflicts and injustices. The power of speech must be exercised in an absolute way, but at the same time the awareness of the value of words must be fully understood. Words, words ... a double-edged weapon of which power is often not known and is not considered. The famous expression body shaming coined by Americans concerns both genders and indicates the mechanism by which the prey, victim of severe and cruel abuses, is ashamed and feels a sense of inadequacy towards his own body and the context in which he lives. Seneca, Roman philosopher, playwright, and politician, already in the first century A.D., affirmed that who is a slave to his own body cannot be considered free: a farsighted analysis if you examine today's society. Some dangerous and inadequate questions often knock on the mind of many. It is essential that you ask yourself: why am I a prisoner of a shell that torments and causes anguish to me? I do not like myself or is it perhaps the judgment of others that leads me to think this? Stereotypes, canons: two terms that are popular in everyday speech, in television programs, on the web. It is amazing to think how fashions change and tastes, judgments unconditionally go hand in hand with them. The history of art allows us to test this phenomenon which has changed widely during the centuries. To begin the long journey, we can start from the era of the Sumerians and the Babylonians, in which the small statues of Inanna and Ishtar, modeled with sinuous shapes, symbolized ideals of prosperity. In the sixteenth century Sandro Botticelli painted a Venus with a soft silhouette, example of grace and beauty. If in the first half of the seventeenth century the Flemish painter Pieter Paul Rubens represented female figures with a shapely body, in the second half of the century the protagonists of the works of Diego Velázquez are women of the high aristocracy that wear tight dresses to shape their physique. In the nineteenth century, Édouard Manet's Breakfast on the grass and Olympia caused a stir: the works depict women who show their "healthy imperfections" with ease and shamelessness. During the Belle Époque, elegant female figures with a slim silhouette become the subjects of many works, while at the beginning of the twentieth century the cubist movement places women in the foreground whose inner discomforts and torments are reflected in their faces and broken bodies. From that moment on, the representation of women no longer respects the limits that until then characterized the vision of the female universe. A clear testimony are the twisted bodies of Schiele and the self-portraits of Frida Khalo who made her being out of stereotypes her peculiar trait. Finally, the protagonists of the works of the contemporary painter Fernando Botero are overweight and satisfied women who are opposed, instead, to those of Lucian Freud, famous for the depictions of women with neglected bodies and sad souls. The evolution of the vision of women in works of art is clear proof of how open-mindedness can ignore certain patterns that are erroneously established and much praised. The exhibition identifies itself as a spokesperson for body positivity and pursues the aim to halt this phenomenon (recognizable as a real form of bullying), not by dialogue but using the tool of art. On this occasion M.A.D.S. wants to represent the starting point of a path aimed at becoming aware of oneself and of one's physical appearance, conferring the right value on its uniqueness. Transforming our weaknesses into our distinguishing mark, converting the demons that make us fall into a dark tunnel in charge of energy. LOVE MY BODY represents a tribute to self-esteem which, if well preserved and nourished, is the winning arm in order to face important challenges and, at the same time, the secret to being in harmony with oneself, both in front of a mirror and surrounded by a crowd.
Kromatic@rt Collection
MADS Milano Exhibition, Milan, Italy 2021
GAIA -The origin- 2021
International Contemporary Art exhibition
March, 26 - April, 4 2021
Concept edited by Vanessa Viti, graduated in Visual Arts and Art Curator
“I am going to sing to the Earth, universal Mother with solid foundations, venerable old woman, who nourishes what is on the surface of it. From you comes fecundity and fertility, O Sovereign !,and it is from you to give and take life from mortal men. Blessed is he to whom you, kindly, honor;he has everything in abundance ... august goddess, generous divinity! Hello, Mother of the Gods, spouse of the starry sky! Grant me a happy life as a reward for my singing!From now on I will remember you in the remaining songs.”
(Homeric Hymn)
What would man be without the ability to think and ask questions? The most ancient civilizations have given us a gift, not only of answers, but also of wonderful stories in which to be able to discover the mysteries of the world. In ancient Greece it was said that at the beginning of time there was only darkness, a sort of black hole, which the Greeks called Chaos: an endless abyss where nothing is defined and where the concept of order does not exist. From the Chaos emerges Gaia, or Mother Earth, she is a distinct, solid, visible and tangible form. Gaia represents the primordial idea of cosmic order and balance. It will be Gaia herself to generate Uranus, the sky, creating the first principle of absolute balance, a sort of double that stands out above her and completes her. The concept of Mother Earth belongs to many ancestral mythologies; different peoples, in different places, with different names have revered the parent of every living being: Gaia for the Greeks, Tellus for the Romans, Joro for the Norsemen. To incarnate the archetype of the divine, in the most ancient cultures, it is always a female being, since it represents the mystery of birth. If on the one hand the divinity of Gaia has been honored, venerated and invoked through pagan rites, there are few artistic works dedicated to her and that have come down to us, after all -from the Middle Ages onwards- artists have turned their look to Christian representations. Somehow it will be Gustave Courbet in 1866 to remind us that "the origin" is a feminine noun, when he represents in an impeccable way the vulva of a woman and entitled the work "The origin of the world". This is the time to pay homage to Gaia, bypassing territorial, cultural and religious limits and borders, because we belong to Mother Earth, we owe our life to her, and we will return to her at the fulfillment of our days. Life and death merge into a single mystery, opposites that find balance in the depiction of Gaia, as the one who gives life at the same time welcomes the death of her children in her own womb. "She gives and she takes, She rules until the end of time, She goes her own way", it is with these words that the band Within Temptation speaks of Mother Earth, in the song of the same name. Gaia walks her path freely, every living being instead seeks that same path -because as much as history and contemporary life distance us from her- we cannot escape the indissoluble bond that exists between us and Mother Earth. The artist's role is to evoke emotions and memories; through the production of works of art he is called to dig into the most intimate and ancestral memory. The time to pay homage to Gaia is ripe, the right way to reunite and consolidate the connection with her is precisely art. Artists of all times have shaken souls and thoughts, they have moved peoples and cultures, now is the time to recall primordial memories in people and to invoke Gaia. If Mnemosine (or memory) is the daughter of Gaia, art is in some way the daughter of Mnemosine because it has always been the first tool used to preserve memory itself. The "Gaia: The Origin" exhibition aims to retrace history through a series of works, both figurative and abstract, and to bring back sleeping or hidden feelings, intimate and perhaps forgotten emotions. As Gaia represents a sort of splendor, so it wants to be the exhibition promoted by M.A.D.S.: a glow that makes thoughts and emotions explode. With this project M.A.D.S. asks artists to arm themselves with creative ingenuity, to find the right colors, get rid of any iconographic scheme to give life to new and infinite representations of Gaia.