RASSEGNA MIART 2019

15/04/2019 web web foglio sheet 2/4 A 31/05/19, 13)09 Sheela Gowda at the HangarBicocca | Apollo Magazine Pagina 2 di 14 https://www.apollo-magazine.com/sheela-gowda-pirelli-hangarbicocca/ TWITTER FACEBOOK LINKEDIN EMAIL The Pirelli HangarBicocca is a daunting venue for any artist. Once a manufacturing plant, since 2004 its 15,000 square metres have been turned into one of Europe’s largest exhibition spaces. The vast arena is split into three sections – the Shed, the Navate and the Cubo – each retaining the original rough walls and functional beams and pillars Pirelli inherited. Exhibiting artists are forbidden from using walls to divide up the space they are allocated. As if that were not enough of a challenge, half the Navate space, screened off with black curtains, is permanently occupied by Anselm Kiefer’s monumental site-specific installation, The Seven Heavenly Palaces 2004–2015 , commissioned by Pirelli to mark the foundation’s opening and setting a tone of unimpeachable grandeur and seriousness. With ‘Remains’, however – which opened in the Navate during this year’s Milan Art Week – the artist Sheela Gowda has convincingly made the space her own. It helps that since the 1990s Gowda has worked increasingly with everyday materials. On show here are works constructed from tarpaulin, cow dung, human hair, wooden door frames, metal tar drums, red cotton, ash – materials whose functional resonances she sounds out in her formally sophisticated installations. They are at home in this industrial space. Even so, the journey Gowda and the show’s curators have created here, through work spanning nearly three decades, ranging from installations and sculptures to prints and watercolours, and including a new work conceived specifically for the occasion, navigates the architecture on easy terms, seizing the opportunities it offers for expansion and dialogue. Gowda was born in Bhadravati in the southern state of Karnataka in India in 1957. She trained in painting at the famous M.S. University of Baroda and Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. On her return to India in 1984, after postgraduate study in painting at the Royal College of Art in London, she began to move away from working with oil on canvas, turning instead to the materials around her, to excavate their meanings – historical, ritual, psychological, political – through her artistic labour. And That Is No Lie (2015) and It Stands Fallen (2015–16), Sheela Gowda. Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2019. Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli Pagina 1 di 14 a-pirelli-hangarbicocca/ her extraordinary works made out of everyday 15 APRIL2019 sio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan