Gallery Davide Di Maggio in cooperation with gallery Studio Legale is glad to present the group show “Close to Home”. The exhibition puts together a new generation of artists who have each developed an individual personal pictorial language but share a common feature that join and pervade their own work; that of an intimate atmosphere of micro-narrative.
Marius Bercea draws inspiration for his lively and engaging figurative paintings from what he describes as “an intensely personal archive”: family photographs, newspaper clippings, tales from his family’s history and his own memories of growing up in Romania under the Communist regime. The characters he paints on his canvas seem to pervade the space instead of inhabiting it.
Similarly the works by Kate Lyddon refer to her own memories. Lyddon's paintings are predominantly occupied by fictitious characters. Dancers, trapeze artists and performers strut and swing across the canvas or paper to the tune of the artist's imagined second life. Their faces are deformed, their smiles are distorted and coarse, their glances are empty, the perspectives are reversed, the situations depicted are tragicomic and surreal.
Delicately painted portraits of famous women are a romantic focus in the works of Alika Cooper. She investigates the socially infectious personas of a handful of celebrities, classic and contemporary, including women as widely revered as Greta Garbo, Anne Bancroft, Joan Crawford et al. With the understated synthesis of an opaque, neutral gouache palette on earth-toned printmaking paper, she harnesses sketch by sketch the transforming aura of Hollywood stars. Alika’s work comes at an important time when media focus on celebrity is pervasive and highly influential throughout our society today.
Bryson Gills’s drawings and paintings reflect a surreal subject based world, in which the delicate aesthetics are reminiscent of the traditions of earlier landscape and interior studies. The works are dominated by a peculiar, almost scary silence. It is as if he forces time to stop, so as to show us unobserved elements and secrets in the world around us, and to reveal how we relate to and interact with them. Gill simultaneously masters the Romantic landscape painting whilst giving life to the genre by infusing his work with a new psychology and creating space for self reflection.
George Young collects, edits, reproduces and assembles images of cultural artefacts, ephemera and literary fiction. The paintings are simplified and estranged from their previous contexts and coupled with precise, formal structures that extend and respond to the painting environment.
The meaning of an image is altered by its context and the method of its reproduction. “What I want to do is present a set of propositions, some ambiguous in themselves, some evident, which can combine in myriad ways - like words – to create new narratives, except unlike language it is not linear, but three dimensional, and when perceived from different angles, will be viewed through different frames of reference”.
Allison Schulnik´s paintings are influenced by films, animation, cartoons, old Disney ephemera from the thirties, and fairy tales. She creates her distinctive style by using old worn brushes and thick globs of paint. The resulting canvases depict a controlled chaos that is often on an epic scale in which her characters may reside.
Jacob Tillmann´s paintings are rich with humour. Domestic landscapes like interiors of houses magically transform themselves in visionary spaces: caves with prehistoric rock paintings on the wall or baroque rooms with very eccentric wallpapers. The canvas becomes the screen on which the ancestral fantasies and fear of the painter are projected.

Opening 10 december 6.30pm

Galleria Davide di Maggio
viale Monza 10 - 20127 Milano
Opening hours: Mon. - Sat. 10a.m - 12.30 p.m. / 3 - 7.30 p.m.
free admission