Claudia Losi: Asking Shelter

Vernissage: Mittwoch, 18. Januar 2017, 18:30 Uhr

We are pleased to announce the exhibition by Claudia Losi at the gallery in Milan, after her recent solo show at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia and her participation in the Hangzhou Triennial in China.

In this exhibition Claudia Losi presents a cycle of new works, creating a sort of open ecosystem inside the space of the gallery. The central nucleus is the project Asking Shelter: a series of sculptures that represent archaic, essential huts constructed with rose branches cast in bronze, that have shapes of shelters existing since thousands of years in different areas of the planet - highly symbolic and narrative forms. They offer shelter and safety, but also oblige us to stay alert, they might also harbor danger. On some of the branches there are silver reproductions of small metamorphic insects that have backs backs like rose thorns (from the family of the Membracidae).

At the entrance to the exhibition there is a photographic enlargement of a fertilized human ovum taken from a science textbook from the 1960s. It resembles a planetary system ready to receive something else, to multiply, to create a new body - ecosystem. This composite image of a system that contains other systems returns in the globular silk sculpture suspended from the ceiling. In the following room we find silk fabrics colored with vegetal dyes, printed with images of animals juxtaposed by resemblance, recalling the caves where thousands of years ago our ancestors drew their own cosmologies, populating the spaces with beings who shared their habitat: here the animals become ethereal witnesses of the events of the world. The itinerary closes with a series of works about the metamorphic and fragile being par excellence: the butterfly. Wall projections and images of butterflies and moths etched on marble slabs show them as they feed, emerge from the chrysalis or seek the last autumn warmth. Once again, vulnerability and the search for protection become synonymous with the human desire to find comfort, to find meaning in the things that surround us. An open ecosystem that welcomes but can also repel, that changes its quality and can become something other than itself.

Claudia Losi was born in 1971 in Piacenza, where she lives and works. She uses a variety of media, from site-specific installations to sculpture, from video to works on fabric and paper. Interested in different disciplines – natural sciences, ethnology, geology, cartography, poetry and literature – her artistic research focuses on the relationship between man and nature, on travel and exploration as experiences of knowledge. Losi investigates the concept of storytelling through art and writing, often using her work as a trigger to connect and create new communities in human relations. She recently completed a solo show at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, accompanied by the artist’s book “How do I imagine being there?” published by Humboldt Books. In 2012 and 2010 she had shows at La Maréchalerie in Versailles, the MAXXI Museum in Rome and MAGASIN Grenoble, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan, and at the Royal Academy in London. In 2008 she had solo shows at Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Stenersen Museum of Oslo and Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. In 2007 she took part in the Sharjah Biennial 8 in the United Arab Emirates. From 2004 to 2011 she developed the Balena Project: the mythical tale of a whale made in fabric, life size, which traveled the world, involving different people and imaginaries at each of its passages.