Unmatter
Joshua Hagler, Luisa Rabbia, Maja Ruznic
Curated by Alberto Fiz
Eduardo Secci
Milan, from April 28 to August 5, 2022
Opening of the solo show and new gallery location in Via Olmetto:
Thursday, April 28, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Exhibition walkthrough video available online
Exhibition view, Unmatter, 2022, Eduardo Secci Milano, Photo The Knack Studio, Courtesy the artists and Eduardo Secci, Milan, Florence
Eduardo Secci is pleased to announce the opening of the new location in the historic center of Milan, in Via Olmetto 1, joining the venue in the city and Florence.
The gallery opens on April 28, 2022, with the exhibition entitled “Unmatter” curated by Alberto Fiz, featuring works by Joshua Hagler, Luisa Rabbia, and Maja Ruznic. The group show takes place until August 5, 2022.
“Unmatter” involves three international artists characterized by their own language, here for the first time together expressing a common alphabet of feelings.
The concept of “unmatter” is defined as neither matter nor anti-matter, but something liminal, and its existence seems in the universe extremely possible.
As the curator Alberto Fiz explains, the exhibition including mainly painting, some in a large size - conceived in the last year and never before presented - “should not be considered as a simple group show but as an exhibition project able to convey the same attitude towards painting, understood as a territory of methodological comparison destined to go beyond the standardized canons of representation.”
Observing the works on view, it appears clear that painting for the artists is an all-encompassing experience capable of creating a complex web of signs focused on identifying a psychic and emotional matrix.
Joshua Hagler’s wide color sections develop the pantheistic part that concerns the entire pictorial process according to what happens with Night Swim (For Eileen) (2021), a two-meter nocturnal rhapsody, where shapes float freely in space, giving life to phantom images that inhabit the unconscious.
Luisa Rabbia repossesses the profound meaning of painting through an investigation that integrates the intimate experience of the self with otherness, creating a mapping that allows her to contemplate every aspect within a personal cosmology. L’attesa(2021) demonstrates this, where the vastness of space seems to be welcomed in a dilated body: "I am interested in the connections between an inner landscape, grounded on personal experience, and a collective landscape, in which you meet the Other also understood as a physical landscape, as an environment,” the artist says.
Also, Maja Ruznic elaborates a layered painting, where the figures seem to emerge from subtle chromatic overlaps as revealed by Father (Red Light) (2021) and Field (Mother/Deep Red) (2021). The artist weaves different registers in the context of a practice characterized by uninterrupted transits between shape and color, memory and identity.
The exhibition, therefore, proposes an ambiguous and engaging investigation, as if the image not is represented, but the painting itself, which for the three artists connects with the deep feeling of being.
The exhibition walkthrough video with the artists will be online at: www.eduardosecci.com/exhibitions.
Alberto Fiz (1963) is an art critic, curator, art and art market journalist, and art advisor for Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking.
Joshua Hagler (1979, Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, United States) lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico, where he moved in 2018 as a grant recipient of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. He graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson with a degree in visual communications. Self-directed research and travel inspire the artist career determining how he integrates creative influences with life experience. He explores subjects including his middle American upbringing, the 19th-century exploration of North America, modern science fiction, and the traditions of Italian religious art. Hagler confronts ideas of extreme religious experience and notions of wider cultural and social identities. He conceives large-format canvases with scenes often distorted by gestural smears of fluid brushwork that enter into realms of abstraction. His paintings, sculptures, videos, and animations have been exhibited internationally: “The Living Circle Us”, curated by David Anfam, Unit London, London, 2021; “Drawing in the Dark”, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas, 2021; “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded”, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, 2018; “The River Lethe”, Brand Library & Art Center, Los Angeles, 2018, “With Liberty and Justice for Some”, Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, 2018; “Dreams and Fevers”, Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2018, among others. In 2021, he released his first monograph entitled “This is the Picture”. Furthermore, he is also an author of poems and essays.
Luisa Rabbia (1970, Pinerolo, Italy) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin. The artist blends distinctions between human and natural, expressing empathy with the cosmos through the organic and corporeal landscapes of the large-format paintings. The scale of her works adapts to the explored themes, often representing overlapping abstract figures that come together and break, apparently going beyond their physicality. She alludes to interconnected natural processes forming a common thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state. Her forms in expressive tones also evoke spiritual transitions in continuous evolution and transformation. On closer observation and a more intimate level, her physical and intuitive process becomes visible with rhythmically scraped painting, layering of pencil marks, and fingerprints. Rabbia refers to the tiny traces everyone leaves in their lifetime but concurrently affirms an expansive and interconnected vision of a larger universe. Among her solo shows: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, 2017; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2014; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, 2010; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, 2009; Fondazione Merz, Turin, 2009. Among group shows: Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, New York, 2020; Manifesta 12, Palazzo Drago, Palermo, 2018; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2018; Biennale del Disegno 2016, Museo della Città, Rimini; Lismore Castle, 2016; Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, 2015; Maison Particulière, Brussels, 2014; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Università di Harvard, Cambridge, 2013; Museo del Novecento, Milan, 2012; MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, 2006. In 2022, she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Maja Ruznic (1983, Bosnia and Herzegovina) lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico. She immigrated with family to the United States in 1995, settling on the West Coast. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and received an MFA from the California College of Arts. The artist paintings with diluted and blurred figures and landscapes investigate themes of nostalgia and trauma, which are partially related to her experience of war and refugee. Furthermore, the work reflects her interests in religions and mythology, including Slavic paganism and shamanism. Among her exhibitions: “Hi Woman! La notizia del futuro”, curated by Francesco Bonami, Museo di Palazzo Pretorio, Prato, 2021; “In the Sliver of the Sun: Maja Ruznic”, Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, 2021; “Parallax: A RAiR Connection Exhibition”, Roswell Museum and Art Center, 2018; “Sincerely Yours”, Torrance Art Museum, 2015. In 2018, she was awarded the Hopper Prize. Various museum collections contain her works, such as the Dallas Art Museum and EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art.
Eduardo Secci is an Italian gallery founded in 2013 in Florence with a second location in Milan from June 2021. It presents a double program featuring the exhibitions of the main gallery and its independent experimental space NOVO.
Exhibition view, Unmatter, 2022, Eduardo Secci Milano, Photo The Knack Studio, Courtesy the artists and Eduardo Secci, Milan, Florence
Eduardo Secci Milano (Via Olmetto) NEW LOCATION
Unmatter - Joshua Hagler, Luisa Rabbia, Maja Ruznic
Curated by Alberto Fiz
From April 28 to August 5, 2022
NOVO Milano (Via Olmetto) NEW LOCATION
Tillman Kaiser
Curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto
From April 28 to August 5, 2022
Opening: Thursday, April 28, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Via Olmetto 1, Milan, Italy / milano@eduardosecci.com
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 1:30 pm / 2:30 - 7:00 pm
Eduardo Secci Milano (Via Zenale)
Daniel Crews-Chubb and Kevin Francis Gray
Curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto
From April 1 to June 3, 2022 (extended)
Via Zenale 3, Milan, Italy / +39 02 38248728 / milano@eduardosecci.com
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 1:30 pm / 2:30 - 7:00 pm
Eduardo Secci Firenze
a question of vibrancy/earthly sight - Natalie Ball, Khari Johnson-Ricks, Maria Maea, Azikiwe Mohammed, Devin N. Morris, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Elise Peterson, Adee Roberson, Khalif Tahir Thompson
Curated by Essence Harden
From March 25 to May 21, 2022
Piazza Goldoni 2, Florence, Italy / +39 055 661356 / firenze@eduardosecci.com
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 1:30 pm / 2:30 - 7:00 pm
www.eduardosecci.com / gallery@eduardosecci.com / IG @eduardoseccigallery / FB @eduardoseccicontemporary
www.novo.ooo / hello@novo.ooo / IG @novo_projects / FB @NOVOprojects
Exhibition walkthroughs videos with artists and curators:
www.eduardosecci.com/exhibitions - www.novo.ooo/exhibitions
Press Office: THE KNACK STUDIO / Tamara Lorenzi
tamara@theknackstudio.com / +39 347 0712934
info@theknackstudio.com / www.theknackstudio.com
Unmatter
Joshua Hagler, Luisa Rabbia, Maja Ruznic
Curated by Alberto Fiz
Eduardo Secci
Milan, from April 28 to August 5, 2022
Opening of the solo show and new gallery location in Via Olmetto:
Thursday, April 28, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Exhibition walkthrough video available online
Exhibition view, Unmatter, 2022, Eduardo Secci Milano, Photo The Knack Studio, Courtesy the artists and Eduardo Secci, Milan, Florence
Eduardo Secci is pleased to announce the opening of the new location in the historic center of Milan, in Via Olmetto 1, joining the venue in the city and Florence.
The gallery opens on April 28, 2022, with the exhibition entitled “Unmatter” curated by Alberto Fiz, featuring works by Joshua Hagler, Luisa Rabbia, and Maja Ruznic. The group show takes place until August 5, 2022.
“Unmatter” involves three international artists characterized by their own language, here for the first time together expressing a common alphabet of feelings.
The concept of “unmatter” is defined as neither matter nor anti-matter, but something liminal, and its existence seems in the universe extremely possible.
As the curator Alberto Fiz explains, the exhibition including mainly painting, some in a large size - conceived in the last year and never before presented - “should not be considered as a simple group show but as an exhibition project able to convey the same attitude towards painting, understood as a territory of methodological comparison destined to go beyond the standardized canons of representation.”
Observing the works on view, it appears clear that painting for the artists is an all-encompassing experience capable of creating a complex web of signs focused on identifying a psychic and emotional matrix.
Joshua Hagler’s wide color sections develop the pantheistic part that concerns the entire pictorial process according to what happens with Night Swim (For Eileen) (2021), a two-meter nocturnal rhapsody, where shapes float freely in space, giving life to phantom images that inhabit the unconscious.
Luisa Rabbia repossesses the profound meaning of painting through an investigation that integrates the intimate experience of the self with otherness, creating a mapping that allows her to contemplate every aspect within a personal cosmology. L’attesa(2021) demonstrates this, where the vastness of space seems to be welcomed in a dilated body: "I am interested in the connections between an inner landscape, grounded on personal experience, and a collective landscape, in which you meet the Other also understood as a physical landscape, as an environment,” the artist says.
Also, Maja Ruznic elaborates a layered painting, where the figures seem to emerge from subtle chromatic overlaps as revealed by Father (Red Light) (2021) and Field (Mother/Deep Red) (2021). The artist weaves different registers in the context of a practice characterized by uninterrupted transits between shape and color, memory and identity.
The exhibition, therefore, proposes an ambiguous and engaging investigation, as if the image not is represented, but the painting itself, which for the three artists connects with the deep feeling of being.
The exhibition walkthrough video with the artists will be online at: www.eduardosecci.com/exhibitions.
Alberto Fiz (1963) is an art critic, curator, art and art market journalist, and art advisor for Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking.
Joshua Hagler (1979, Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, United States) lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico, where he moved in 2018 as a grant recipient of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. He graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson with a degree in visual communications. Self-directed research and travel inspire the artist career determining how he integrates creative influences with life experience. He explores subjects including his middle American upbringing, the 19th-century exploration of North America, modern science fiction, and the traditions of Italian religious art. Hagler confronts ideas of extreme religious experience and notions of wider cultural and social identities. He conceives large-format canvases with scenes often distorted by gestural smears of fluid brushwork that enter into realms of abstraction. His paintings, sculptures, videos, and animations have been exhibited internationally: “The Living Circle Us”, curated by David Anfam, Unit London, London, 2021; “Drawing in the Dark”, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas, 2021; “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded”, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, 2018; “The River Lethe”, Brand Library & Art Center, Los Angeles, 2018, “With Liberty and Justice for Some”, Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, 2018; “Dreams and Fevers”, Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2018, among others. In 2021, he released his first monograph entitled “This is the Picture”. Furthermore, he is also an author of poems and essays.
Luisa Rabbia (1970, Pinerolo, Italy) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin. The artist blends distinctions between human and natural, expressing empathy with the cosmos through the organic and corporeal landscapes of the large-format paintings. The scale of her works adapts to the explored themes, often representing overlapping abstract figures that come together and break, apparently going beyond their physicality. She alludes to interconnected natural processes forming a common thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state. Her forms in expressive tones also evoke spiritual transitions in continuous evolution and transformation. On closer observation and a more intimate level, her physical and intuitive process becomes visible with rhythmically scraped painting, layering of pencil marks, and fingerprints. Rabbia refers to the tiny traces everyone leaves in their lifetime but concurrently affirms an expansive and interconnected vision of a larger universe. Among her solo shows: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, 2017; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2014; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, 2010; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, 2009; Fondazione Merz, Turin, 2009. Among group shows: Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, New York, 2020; Manifesta 12, Palazzo Drago, Palermo, 2018; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2018; Biennale del Disegno 2016, Museo della Città, Rimini; Lismore Castle, 2016; Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, 2015; Maison Particulière, Brussels, 2014; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Università di Harvard, Cambridge, 2013; Museo del Novecento, Milan, 2012; MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, 2006. In 2022, she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Maja Ruznic (1983, Bosnia and Herzegovina) lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico. She immigrated with family to the United States in 1995, settling on the West Coast. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and received an MFA from the California College of Arts. The artist paintings with diluted and blurred figures and landscapes investigate themes of nostalgia and trauma, which are partially related to her experience of war and refugee. Furthermore, the work reflects her interests in religions and mythology, including Slavic paganism and shamanism. Among her exhibitions: “Hi Woman! La notizia del futuro”, curated by Francesco Bonami, Museo di Palazzo Pretorio, Prato, 2021; “In the Sliver of the Sun: Maja Ruznic”, Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, 2021; “Parallax: A RAiR Connection Exhibition”, Roswell Museum and Art Center, 2018; “Sincerely Yours”, Torrance Art Museum, 2015. In 2018, she was awarded the Hopper Prize. Various museum collections contain her works, such as the Dallas Art Museum and EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art.
Eduardo Secci is an Italian gallery founded in 2013 in Florence with a second location in Milan from June 2021. It presents a double program featuring the exhibitions of the main gallery and its independent experimental space NOVO.
Exhibition view, Unmatter, 2022, Eduardo Secci Milano, Photo The Knack Studio, Courtesy the artists and Eduardo Secci, Milan, Florence
Eduardo Secci Milano (Via Olmetto) NEW LOCATION
Unmatter - Joshua Hagler, Luisa Rabbia, Maja Ruznic
Curated by Alberto Fiz
From April 28 to August 5, 2022
NOVO Milano (Via Olmetto) NEW LOCATION
Tillman Kaiser
Curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto
From April 28 to August 5, 2022
Opening: Thursday, April 28, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Via Olmetto 1, Milan, Italy / milano@eduardosecci.com
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 1:30 pm / 2:30 - 7:00 pm
Eduardo Secci Milano (Via Zenale)
Daniel Crews-Chubb and Kevin Francis Gray
Curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto
From April 1 to June 3, 2022 (extended)
Via Zenale 3, Milan, Italy / +39 02 38248728 / milano@eduardosecci.com
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 1:30 pm / 2:30 - 7:00 pm
Eduardo Secci Firenze
a question of vibrancy/earthly sight - Natalie Ball, Khari Johnson-Ricks, Maria Maea, Azikiwe Mohammed, Devin N. Morris, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Elise Peterson, Adee Roberson, Khalif Tahir Thompson
Curated by Essence Harden
From March 25 to May 21, 2022
Piazza Goldoni 2, Florence, Italy / +39 055 661356 / firenze@eduardosecci.com
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 1:30 pm / 2:30 - 7:00 pm
www.eduardosecci.com / gallery@eduardosecci.com / IG @eduardoseccigallery / FB @eduardoseccicontemporary
www.novo.ooo / hello@novo.ooo / IG @novo_projects / FB @NOVOprojects
Exhibition walkthroughs videos with artists and curators:
www.eduardosecci.com/exhibitions - www.novo.ooo/exhibitions
Press Office: THE KNACK STUDIO / Tamara Lorenzi
tamara@theknackstudio.com / +39 347 0712934
info@theknackstudio.com / www.theknackstudio.com
