Baert Gallery is delighted to participate in Frieze Los Angeles (booth F2) with new works by Iliodora Margellos and Paolo Colombo.
Iliodora Margellos’ presentation features a selection of the artist’s newest pieces in thread, wire mesh, metal, and fabric. Titled (Home) Situation Afloat, it brings together an interconnected network of multimedia sculptural objects that take inspiration from motherhood and its (re)generative possibilities, the legacies of craft and abstraction, and the phenomenology of the digital condition imposed by the pandemic. The presentation focuses on the notions of home and estía (Greek word for hearth/focus/fireplace), as well as on the intrinsic human need for protection and security – while simultaneously embracing the reality of that longing’s wishful fallacy, and its intrinsic impossibility within the natural world. The title for this project alludes to Michel Foucault’s formulation of heterotopia, an idea of a private world within the larger world all of its own, and the boat specifically as a floating heterotopic location par excellence, “a place without a place, that exists by itself, and is closed in on itself, and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea”.
Paolo Colomb’s newest body of work draws on classical and Byzantine art as well as on memory and emotional projection, evoking the hovering temporality of feeling. One of the large works represents a gently blushing face and head of Aphrodite (Beginning of Time to Present), floating in about 72,000 gray mosaic tassels in watercolor, based on a statue from the National Archeological Museum of Athens. The influence of the classical world and of Greece, where Colombo has lived for many years, has long been an inspiration for his work. This inspiration takes particular shape in the fragment –for instance, of hands– as well as a Byzantine-styled attention to mosaics and flat surfaces, always evoked in a declaration of space.
