Alice Ronchi Francesca Minini

Alice Ronchi (b.1989) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. She gained her BA at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan in 2012, and her MA at the department of Material Utopias at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, in 2015. In 2014 she started her collaboration with Francesca Minini Gallery (Milan).

In Alice Ronchi’s sculptures and installations everyday objects meet the world of invention and fantasy. The search of wonder is a constant theme in her work, populated by familiar yet enigmatic figures, the product of an abstract reworking. Somewhere in between playful and minimal, her work is a perfect synthesis between simplicity of expression and complexity of forms and meanings. 

With the use of different media, ranging from sculpture to photography, from performance to video, Ronchi questions the world through a careful and curious gaze, giving us her magical vision. 

Franca Sonnino Repetto Gallery

Franca Sonnino was born and lives in Rome. After graduating in literature, in the early ‘70s she began her artistic career devoting herself to painting. With this purpose in mind she asks the artist Maria Lai, at the time her neighbor, to give her drawing lessons. Lai will soon become her artistic guidance and a close friend. Sonnino’s works of those years are dense reticles, multitudes of painted lines, whose deep impulse is born from intimate poetic theorems rather than from Euclidean models.

The thread, already present as the subject of her paintings, will soon become a privileged medium in Sonnino’s art, permanently replacing the brush from the end of the ‘70s. The artist, with cotton thread draws around a piece of wire, outlines the contours of objects in space, simulating the third dimension. She outlined such imaginative bookcases provocatively arranged on walls, with plays of shadows on books of air. She also creates loose volumes and detached sheets, knitted, alluding cryptically, with thread, to writing. Since 1973, she has regularly exhibited in galleries and museums in Italy and abroad. In February 2019 the Textile Museum of Busto Arsizio dedicated to her and Maria Lai the exhibition “Maria Lai and Franca Sonnino Masterpieces of Italian fiber art”.

Mia Chaplin Whatiftheworld

Mia Chaplin (b.1990 South Africa) is a painter who lives and works in Cape Town. Working in oil on canvas and paper, her highly expressive works are characterised by their rich impasto surfaces and visible brushstrokes. Chaplin’s most recent works emphasize a muted colour palette of pink fleshy tones and golden highlights. Consisting of still lifes, figure studies and landscapes, her work seems to meditate on the familiar. Her loose, erratic style of painting – synonymous with that of the impressionists – is intuitive, heightening the emotionality of her pieces. They communicate a sense of estrangement; reflecting a detachment between the self and her surroundings. Her works sway between voyeurism and intimate interaction, while remaining consistently self-referential.

Since completing her BFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2011, Chaplin has hosted four solo exhibitions, Mouth (2018), Under a Boiling River (2017) and Binding Forms (2016), with WHATIFTHEWORLD and most recently, Underbelly (2019), with No Man’s Art Gallery in Amsterdam. She has furthermore extended her painting practice into printmaking, hosting a mini-exhibition of monotypes from the series, The Making of a Sharp Blade (2017), in collaboration with Warren Editions, Cape Town. Chaplin has completed artist residency programmes at Cité Internationale Des Artes in the Marais district, Paris (2018), Nirox Arts Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa (2016) and at OBRAS Foundation in Alentejo, Portugal (2015).

Marepe Franco Noero

Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto, b.1970) is a Brazilian contemporary artist best known for his minimalist wood and metal sculptures and drawings. His artwork alludes his origins: culture and tradition of his birthplace, the concept of shortage, colonization and globalization are the artist’s main approaches. Marepe lives and works in Santo Antonio de Jesus, Brazil. Marepe’s artwork expresses his personal perception upon his life juxtaposed with the political and socio-cultural spirit of Brazil, represented using everyday objects, local materials and events from his home based surroundings. Transporting ordinary objects into the world of art, the artist honours the Duchampian wave of the prêt-à-porter, but he also induces it, creating new meanings.

The fact that Marepe lives in his native town influences his art; the everyday life in Brazil is Marape’s source for creation: stalls, low-income ménages, metallic basins or trees trunk – are mixed in his artwork Marepe includes these items in different universes resulting an “alterity” within the artistic world, alluding subjects as colonialism, identity issues, various differences between social classes and the antithesis between the modern and the traditional lifestyles. Marepe renders objects which may seem useless but which are a necessity in some of the under developed areas of Brazil.

Pavel Büchler Annex 14

Pavel’s practice enclose a wide range of media counting installation, photography, books and performance. He intervenes in the real world, instead of making objects. He operates found materials – images, objects, photographs, texts and audio recordings to reveal the weirdness in everyday life. He describes his practice as “making nothing happen”.

Pavel Büchler was born in Prague where he studied at the School of Graphic Arts and the Institute of Applied Arts in the 1970s. He went to England in 1981 and from 1992-96 was Head of Fine Art at the highly influential Glasgow School of Art before been appointed Research Professor in Art at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1997.