“DOMESTICITY”
Galerie Gregor Staiger’s summer group exhibition in the Milan space is titled Domesticity. The exhibition includes works by artists E’wao Kagoshima, Nuri Koerfer, Walter Pfeiffer and Sonia Kacem.
Many prefer to stay at home: the visual habits of digital sedentaries simply transpire from the TV to the computer passing through the smartphone screen sitting on the sofa in a to and fro movement that transforms the domestic space into a loop. The new digital sedentaries remind us in this sense of the perception of the world of the Hopi Native American, for whom it is not people who move in space, but space that flows through them: their gestures do nothing but simulate walking, acting, sitting, standing and so on.
Domesticity takes its inspiration from this presence of virtual-surreal traces and physical objects that describe the places in which we live in order to create a dialogue between two generations of artists who use the representation of the body, its absence and its metamorphoses as vehicles for reflecting on issues such as dwelling and desire.
Nuri Koerfer’s new sculptures appear as zoomorphic furniture, like chairs and benches that offer the viewer an unusual interaction with the work of art. The artist’s research, which starts from the analysis of semiotic structures and from the concept of social sculpture, manifests through forms and materials a careful and very personal approach to the medium of sculpture, figuration that creates frictions and tension of meanings between nature and artifice, domesticity and public space, durability and vulnerability.
Cult artist E’wao Kagoshima’s drawings contain an uninterrupted flow of feelings in images which flow from the unconscious: dreams, hallucinations and deep desires, far from the utilitarian logic of common language, espouse instead a rich and generative narrative of new links with reality. Kagoshima’s works present a range of fantastical anatomies, in which the body is represented in a constant stream of transformation: dispossessed, dematerialised and recomposed. Heir of surrealist sensibility, E’wao Kagoshima combines a renewed interest in figuration with darker tendencies or, alternatively, with a joyful sense of wonder and amazement.
Seminal photographer Walter Pfeiffer presents both photographic work and drawings where he investigates the theme of the absent body. Famous for his images of eternal youth, which have consecrated him as one of the most important authors of contemporary photography, in these works Walter Pfeiffer seems to replace the sunny and carefree teenage anatomies with images of empty armchairs but which testify to the passage
and the imprint of who used them; in this way, even without real bodies, the seats reflect the identity of those who use them with the absence, leaving marks as clothes, blankets and giving the viewer that the time spent on them is an eternal time.
In the main room the gallery, transformed into a unique living-space, Sonia Kacem’ site-specific wallpapers kept in place from her preceding solo exhibition, not only provide the backdrop to the works of other artists, but also transform the perception of space in a gentle and radical way. The patterns imagined by the artist generate a series of vibrant surfaces modulated by rhythm, color, and abstract shapes that never recall a precise iconographic reference but suggest both primitive writings and living forms, capable of canceling the solidity of the walls and projecting the gaze of the spectator in a psychedelic elsewhere.
Domesticity returns and amplifies the disturbing atmospheres of neo-surrealism, combining everyday and reassuring elements of our living the familiar environment with mysterious metaphysical revelations on the perception of space and the things that surround us.
Text by Riccardo Conti
