Allegra Hicks & Paolo Colombo

About

Allegra Hicks studied Art and Design at the Politecnico di Design in Milan and the Ecole de Peinture in Brussels. While in New York, she became the assistant of artist Donald Baechler. She is an acclaimed designer and has written on the subject in her book, “An Eye for Design” (Abrams Press, 2010). She lives and works in London and Naples. The exhibition contains 22 painted and embroidered works on linen, a carpet and a glass sculpture. 

Poet and essayist Andrea Applebee writes of Allegra's work:

Here we encounter paintings on linen, an embroidered anatomical heart, a yonic composition in colored glass.

These works choreograph an utterance, an iterative and urgent push through silences. A language is cultivated of exhaled morphemes of color. A grammar is built of shapes: a woman's discovery of herself, her body, her ability to generate expression and life. A viewer finds an interface: looking in, you brush up against an interstellar space, through which a vibrance pushes from its own world. 

The inner place of these works moves outward through geometries: scaffolds and containing frames. 

Deep mauves, blues, rich multi-toned blacks, pinks and lucid yellows. 

With the penetrative and expansive momentum of breath, pressing forward and outward like a saxophone’s mouth, making a pulse pathway scattering or melting internal forms.  Sometimes geometric shapes are poised, meticulously balanced, as if for target practice. 

We find architectural gestures crossing these works: a traversing through-line repeated, like a tuned string, or soft triangles spreading through a set of paintings arranged together.  This is the cool sensuality of a poetics of touch,  diffusing across balanced designs and blossoming chromatics put into motion.

Paolo Colombo is a painter and curator based in Athens, Greece. He has written two collections of poetry: “Apostolos Michailides”, Agra and Qbox, Athens (2014); and “Not in Sleep Nor in Water”, Kiraathane, Istanbul (2021).  He currently is the Art Advisor for the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. He curated the sixth Istanbul Biennial, the third Salonika Biennial and the second Mardin Biennial. He has exhibited in the UK, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United States.

The exhibition includes a number of works consisting of large scale watercolors and a carpet paired with its source-watercolor. 

Poet and essayist Andrea Applebee writes of Paolo’s work:

These paintings are declarations of space, balancing abstraction and figuration. In them, time's traces shimmer with life in the enigmatic pool of consciousness. We see carefully scattered poppy flowers, hovering circles or organic shapes, escaping hares, a hedgehog showing its soft belly; a woman's face. One enters these spaces by quiet invitation to thought distilled to its essentials. In the abstract pieces, traveling through as many as four planes: the mat crossed with painted lines that also cover a painted ground, washes underneath  fabric-like surfaces and small circular windows to the paper beneath. These are places of soft blues, grays, greens, and pinks, rich yellows and magentas, creamy whites. The sign language of arrangement gives viewers a floating sensation from which we emerge refreshed, as from a garden or poem. Animals and flowers spring into being fully formed from the patient field of fine crossing lines--invited, like us, from another side of the paper--or perhaps invoked as muses are, by song.

Andrea Applebee recently published "Alitheia" for Black Square Edition (New York), "Mercy Athena" in the Cahiers Series (Sylph Press, London), and "Anemones" (Magra Books, Los Angeles/Bagnone). She lives in Athens, Greece.