11Feb/31Mar - UNTITLED#3 - GILDA MAUTONE/ADE QUERCIANERA/BEATE HÖING

11Feb/31Mar

UNTITLED#3

GILDA MAUTONE/ADE QUERCIANERA/BEATE HÖING

The third chapter of the collective series brings three opposing languages into dialogue — minimal painting, decorative painting and figurative ceramics. Ade Quercianera works through reduction: small, almost monochrome canvases, one a bright red nearly devoid of image, and a black canvas crossed by a tangle of dark, reddish marks, where the figure remains suspended on the threshold of visibility, barely perceptible beneath the painted surface. Gilda Mautone, by contrast, brings dense, narrative floral still lifes — vases of flowers with affectionate, almost epistolary titles ("Every day I put a vase of flower on the table thinking of you"), where the traditional still-life subject is charged with explicit sentimentality, between decoration, memory and dedication. Beate Höing closes the trio with glazed ceramic sculptures incorporating found porcelain objects — a baroque vase topped by an explosion of jagged white elements, a mermaid whose tail dissolves into a mass of shells and sea creatures, a small bird with acid-yellow plumage — work that hybridises the decorative tradition of ceramics with an almost surreal taste for excess. Three practices that, despite the distance between their languages, share the same interest in the object as a bearer of memory and affection