Milan Fashion Week may have officially come to a close, but the city’s creative expression certainly hasn’t dulled. For those still in town, we’ve compiled a selection of our favorite shows happening in Milan this month, from Saodat Ismailova, Jacopo Benassi, and Katherine Bradford.
Jacopo Benassi: “Sàlvati Salvàti”
Francesca Minini
September 17-November 9, 2024
Via Privata Massimiano, 25, 20134
Sàlvati Salvàti, exhibition view at Francesca Minini, Milan. Courtesy the Artist and Francesca Minini, Milan Ph. Andrea Rossetti.
“Sàlvati Salvàti” (loosely translated to save yourself, saved) is an invitation to the viewer: open up, express yourself, and you may be saved. The exhibition has quite literally taken over Francesca Minini, featuring a chaotic makeshift wall composed of metal pipes, wood, bags, and works of art. Behind the barricade is a safe haven, offering a peaceful retreat from the chaos of the outside world. It is the newest exhibition from Jacopo Benassi, a highly fluid, multifaceted artist whose work has traversed the realms of portraiture, painting, and performance.
What we love: Joāo Laia’s curatorial text rigorously interrogates the types of chaos—political, interpersonal, introspective, or otherwise—which may have served as sources of inspiration for this exhibition.
Katherine Bradford: “Humankind”
Kaufmann Repetto
September 11-October 31, 2024
Via di Porta Tenaglia, 7, 20121
Katherine Bradford, Humankind, 2024
installation view, kaufmann repetto, Milan. Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York
Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
“Humankind” presents a series of luminous large-scale canvas paintings, each depicting androgynous figures cast in saturated hues of cobalt and blood-red. It is a continuation of Katherine Bradford’s artistic celebration of our interconnectedness. The painter continually honors her commitment to the creative communities of New York and Maine, communicating notions of mutual support and togetherness in her work. Fluid bodies seem to melt into their surroundings, merging medium and subject. Three of the works in “Humankind” further investigate the theme of people interacting with water, a leitmotif in Bradford’s work which she has described as the aspiration “to get the human body to be enfolded in the paint, and therefore in the water.”
What we love: Three paintings in “Humankind” depict bodies half-submerged in vast expanses of tremendously rich, deep shades of ocean-blue, marked by their calm and fluidity.
Saodat Ismailova: “A Seed Under Our Tongue”
Pirelli HangarBicocca
September 12, 2024-January 12, 2025
Via Chiese, 2, 20126
Saodat Ismailova
Arslanbob, 2023-ongoing
Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024
Realized with the support of Magnum Foundation
Courtesy the artist © Saodat Ismailova and Pirelli
HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo by Agostino Osio.
Curated by Roberta Tenconi, “A Seed Under Our Tongue” spans two decades of work from Saodat Ismailova. The contemporary artist is acclaimed for her cerebral fusions of cinema, sound, and visual art, often drawing from her sociopolitical and cultural heritage in Central Asia. Here, these mediums grapple with the complex narratives of colonization, ancestral knowledge, and collective memory. Seven sculptures and seven films explore the idea, in the artist’s words, “that we are responsible for the seven generations before us and the seven generations to come after us.”
What we love: This show features Chillahona (2022), a vertical three-channel installation that debuted at the Venice Biennale and offers a modern reinterpretation of the Uzbek “cosmic” embroidery known as falak. Film and textiles unite to address themes of emptiness and disorder, nodding to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the period of perestroika.
