Materials, spaces, visions: Sophie Ko, Valerie Krause and Marco Andrea Magni dialogue with the spaces of Building in Milan

From Jan. 29 to March 28, 2020, the BUILDING space in Milan will host the exhibition Materie, spazi, visioni, an exhibition project dedicated to three artists, namely Sophie Ko (Tbilisi, 1981), Valerie Krause (Krefeld, 1976) and Marco Andrea Magni (Milan, 1975), who designed the works to be exhibited in dialogue with the architecture of the rooms. Most of the works in the exhibition are therefore site-specific works, new productions or works that have never been exhibited before, according to the exhibition mode that is part of BUILDING’s typical design.

Ko, Krause and Magni are three artists of different orientations but with some common traits: the exhibition is therefore meant to be somewhere between collective and personal, leaving it up to the viewer to grasp differences and affinities. The artists are characterized by the multiplicity of expressive choices, adopted with extreme freedom; noble and canonical materials coexist with others that are instead unconventional, and are chosen without awe for their signifying value.

“Sophie Ko, Krause and Magni,” explains curator Giorgio Verzotti, “know well that to transgress a norm one must know it, have assumed it in all its poignancy: only then can one attempt its ’overcoming’. The modernist lesson, in sculpture in its relation to space, in painting with the radical instance of the monochrome, has been assimilated, now it is a matter of moving forward. The knowledge of art history, not only recent, is commensurate with the attendance of philosophy as the orientation of the work, and perhaps of existence.What is now called into question is the emotional sphere, the creativity of the imagination that forges the materials, forces them to assume almost the thickness of metaphor. The pigment compacted among Sophie Ko’s glass gradually yields to the force of gravity and makes the work an entity in the making; Magni’s velvet surfaces hold the very fine sand of an hourglass, emblem of an exploded time; Krause’s interrupted line draws a fragmented diagonal that energizes the floor on which it is placed. These works and the others on display take on evocative force; the viewer is asked to consider the materials and forms, so freely arranged in space, for what they are, but he or she is also invited to transcend them, to grasp the visionary aspect that each of them at once conceals and reveals.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with critical texts and an essay for each artist (Andrea Pinotti for Sophie Ko, Giulia Bortoluzzi for Valerie Krause and Francesca Pasini for Marco Andrea Magni). For all info you can visit the BUILDING website.

Pictured: Sophie Ko, Temporal Geography. Awakening of the Earth (pure pigment and flower pollen, 25.5 x 31.5 cm)

Materials, spaces, visions: Sophie Ko, Valerie Krause and Marco Andrea Magni dialogue with the spaces of Building in Milan

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