Lysistrata – Monster Chetwynd

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Galerie Gregor Staiger is pleased to present ‘Lysistrata,’ the gallery’s third solo exhibition with British artist Monster Chetwynd (b. 1973). Chetwynd is best known for her exuberant, improvised performances which take on iconic and eclectic moments from cultural history and rework them, as well as ‘Bat Opera’, an expansive and ongoing series of small scale oil paintings. Following an invitation of the National Glass Centre in the UK, Chetwynd recently began collaborating with hot and a lamp glass workers for an exhibition at Durham Cathedral earlier this year. The exhibition in Milan expands on this body of work of playful representations of fantastic worlds and personalities that draw us into a world where naked women climb over the back of a golden duck or dance around a bat while silver eels meander through an underwater landscape.

In addition to the glass works, the show features a new series of watercolors entitled 'Lysistrata' that also provides the title for the exhibition. Named after the Greek drama by Aristophanes, set at the time of the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC, the play’s titular character convinces the women on both sides of the conflict to go on a sex strike in order to end the war. In doing so, she challenges gender-specific role models with her active intervention in political affairs and proves to be an assertive politician thanks to her shrewdness, persuasiveness and determination, a role that was not granted to women in ancient Greece. The watercolors not only refer to the ancient epic, but with their lavish gold frames recall the large-format, heroic history paintings of the 19th century. Both forms allude to the telling of history from the perspective of the victors, which Chetwynd considers largely uninteresting and consequently favors directing our attention to the other, the overlooked, the sideshows that make history(-ies) appear in a different light.

Moreover, Galerie Gregor Staiger and Monster Chetwynd participate in Milano Drawing Week (November 19-27, 2022). For the second time the Ramo Collection is offering a selection of works on paper by 20th-century Italian artists to a circuit of Milanese galleries and institutions. The invitation, addressed to one artist per space, is to identify a work from the collection and place it in dialogue with their own research. At Galerie Gregor Staiger Massimo Campigli’s Senza titolo (Donne che cuciono), 1951 will be on show as Chetwynd states, that she has felt drawn to the representation of women at work ever since she read Silvia Federici’s 'Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation’ (2004). Milano Drawing Week is curated by Irina Zucca from the Collezione Ramo.