The first event, scheduled from 17 March to 15 April 2017, will be the solo show by Elena Monzo, entitled Moon Zoo curated by Cristina Gilda Artese.
All this is Gilda Contemporary Art, the new cultural reality of Milan, which will open its spaces to the public in March 2017, in the oldest heart of the city, in via San Maurilio 14, in the 5 Vie district.
The artistic direction is by Cristina Gilda Artese, a professional in the field of business economics with a great passion for art which has led her to be, since 2004, an active patron of the arts and to found, in 2007, the arsprima association for the promotion of contemporary art, as well as creating OR NOT, a monographic series dedicated to young Italian contemporary artists.
Gilda Contemporary Art will be inaugurated by the personal exhibition of Elena Monzo (1981, Orzinuovi, BS), scheduled from 17 March to 15 April 2017.
The exhibition, entitled Moon Zoo, presents 25 recent works by the Brescian artist that arise from the three passions on which her expressive figure is built: drawing, paper and female iconography.
Elena Monzo's women are characterized by their melancholic, sometimes ironic appearance. Captured in their most intimate weaknesses and in their most fascinating and disturbing aspects, the characters portrayed are almost always accompanied by an animal. The female figures are thus transformed into shamans, deeply linked to Nature and its ancestral and mythical aspects.
Exemplary in this regard is Miss Gilda (guiding image of the exhibition), which depicts a woman next to a multicolored parrot, with her eyes closed in an ascetic and meditative attitude.
“His works – writes Erik Lucini, in the catalog created for the exhibition – do not speak to the eye, but directly to the unconscious. An ancestral unconscious, made up of sensations and stratified personalities that lead to modifications, even from a physical point of view, of his women: because they are not what you see, they are not and will never be what you think they are, but they are simply the 'set of unconscious emotions that formed and created them”.
The exhibition itinerary develops around three groups of works: one of framed papers (150×100 cm), depicting single portraits of female shamans, a second, of monotype round papers on which a point grass embroidery was performed , which recall some oriental works performed on fans, and a third with a banner (170×130 cm) displayed as bulwarks and made with Chinese papers with fabric edges.
The artist pays great attention to the support. All the works, in fact, are made on special papers commissioned by the artist in a Fu zho shop in Shanghai, the most famous street for papers and inks in the Chinese metropolis. The exhibition is accompanied by a monographic catalogue.
