#insight | Art World
#MACFOCUS: SOL CALERO
Artist of the week
#MACFOCUS - the new column of the Milano Art Community offering insights on the most interesting contemporary art galleries, foundations, and nonprofit spaces in Milan and on the work of their artists - is back!
Today we present Sol Calero, born in 1982, Venezuelan but transplanted to Berlin. She creates site-specific installations that work as spaces for gathering. Her works are at once vibrant, bright, and playful, while also examining the political overtones of themes such as cultural representation, national identity, exoticism, and marginalization.
Known for her opulent and colorful three-dimensional tableaus, the artist arrives in Milan - at Francesca Minini's gallery - with a solo show that looks like a discovery of the ruins of an abandoned building. Sol Calero invites visitors into a place of vibrant colors and induces them to search and discover this house. But the title, Casa encontrada (house found), seems to suggest more of an encounter than a discovery, an appointment with the remains and the fragments of stories and places that have ceased to exist. And this house found at the back of the gallery is not only a physical discovery, but also a metaphorical one: returning to imagining the environments in which humans beings interact with each other as shared homes to be taken care of.
On show in Milan (March 22 - May 6, 2023) also a new series of paintings that marks a breaking point with her previous research: if in the past the subjects were more defined and undoubtedly referred to her origins, the new production is more disguised and focuses on the interweaving of human and natural action.
Are nature and culture really distinct poles? The artist chooses the places of oblivion – those hybrid zones significantly modified by human intervention, but then abandoned to be reabsorbed by the environment – as a metaphor and starting point to start mending the clear demarcation line of this dichotomy, re-evaluating thus the meaning of ruin and reflecting on the meaning of common home.
Recent solo exhibitions: Bergen Assembly, Norway (2022); 1646, The Hague (2022); Copenhagen Contemporary (2020); Villa Arson, Nice, France (2020); Tate, Liverpool, UK (2019) and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2019).
Recent group exhibitions: Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2022); Bergen Kunsthall (2021); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (2020) and La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2019). Calero was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2017, which included an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin. She also co-runs a project space in Berlin with Christopher Kline called Kinderhook & Caracas.
For more info Francesca Minini