At C+N Gallery CANEPANERI in Milan, the second solo exhibition of Roger Hiorns

Milan ’s C+N Gallery CANEPANERI welcomes Depower from Nov. 14, 2024 to Jan. 14, 2025, the second solo exhibition in Italy by British artist Roger Hiorns (Birmingham, 1975) curated by Tom Morton. In Hiorns’ new paintings, abstract, vaguely insectoid human forms engage in instinctive acts that could be sex, or ambiguous movement. With its patches of dirty turquoise and bruised pink pigment, the environment they inhabit seems dreamlike, almost fantastical, a place where the usual logics do not quite apply. The surfaces of Hiorns’ canvases are corrupted by fleshy polyps of latex, or obliterated by crystalline blooms of blue copper sulfate, a substance that suggests an authorial, inorganic, devouring growth. The artist refers to these works as “trans” paintings, calling to mind the Latin prefix meaning variously through. A pair of found white Styrofoam containers lie open on the gallery floor as if they were cattle troughs, or perhaps empty sarcophagi. The artist treated their interiors with a wash of liquefied bovine brain matter.

In a found photographic image, flipped onto canvas and stained with blue copper sulfate crystals, are two fundamentalist Christian protesters brandishing signs in front of an abortion clinic. The upside-down text reads “PRAYER IS NOT A CRIME OF THOUGHT,” an unintentionally ironic statement that assumes the two believe their acts of supplication will be noticed and honored by a supernatural power. Hiorns’ new black-and-white film revisits one of his major projects A Retrospective View of the Pathway from 2016, for which he buried a military aircraft in a field in eastern England. The footage of the plane’s burial has been inverted according to the Sabatier effect, so that dark tones appear light and light tones dark, an echo of the inversion implemented by the artist when he removed this deadly piece of machinery from the sky and placed it in the ground. The film’s soundtrack, on the other hand, includes both recordings of the burial field and the sounds of a human digestive system.

Notes about the artist

Roger Hiorns, born in 1975 in Birmingham, England, lives and works in London. He graduated with honors in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1996. His work has been shown in international solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1 in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and De Hallen in Haarlem. Hiorns’ works are part of institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, and Tate Modern in London. In 2009, Hiorns was nominated for the Turner Prize.

At C+N Gallery CANEPANERI in Milan, the second solo exhibition of Roger Hiorns

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.