Giulia Andreani — Art Must Hang — Max Hetzler Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 12 → October 19, 2019

Many heterogeneous sources are invited to this exhibition to express concerns about the practice of painting, through contact with art history, history of feminism, and perhaps even the history of women in the arts. Each work operates as the beginning of a series, in which “male” masters are criticized as much as they are celebrated, whilst their female counterparts emerge from art history. From the buzz of current events — anti-abortion laws, resurgence of fascisms, violent confrontations between police and civilians — allegories, histories and characters appear.

The painting Demonstrationsbild I, 2019 refers to the “protest paintings” (Demonstrationsbilder), a category of paintings tolerated by the communist government of the German Democratic Republic. The work is inspired by an archival photograph from the 1970s, documenting women gatherings during the referendum on abortion rights in Italy. Found in the press, this image illustrates an article expressing the views of male politicians on feminism: E ora lui dice, which translates to “and now he says” — a male comment on women’s history.

Giulia Andreani, Chienne de combat, 2019 Acrylique sur toile — 65 × 81 cm,

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The watercolour Art must hang. L’art doit pendre, 2019 shows a demonstration from the same period, interlaced with geometrically drawn male genitalia.

Nudelntisch (Spaghetti painting), 2019 depicts four pinups at a table, swallowing (or regurgitating?) spaghetti that resemble dripping paint strokes. They make reference to both an Italian archetype and a post-perestroika painting of the East-German artist Sighard Gille.

Art Must Hang? (Swansong crochet deadpan painting), 2019 is based on an archival photograph of Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, in which the latter reads Men in my mother’s life, an inversion of the German edition of Women in my father’s life, written by Vittorio Mussolini, Benito Mussolini’s son. Across this unexpected scene, feminine figures burst in: two girls, one jumping daringly, the other hanged upside down, and Elizabeth Taylor, an amateur painter in The Sandpiper (1965), here masked as a grotesque Crow Mother, painting a portrait of artist Lili Reynaud Dewar. At their feet, an old Josef Albers is found kneeling, sorting sheets of paper: archives? sketches? or perhaps pages from the history of Italian fascism, and its associated misogyny?