As part of Berlin Gallery Weekend, Italian-Tunisian artist Monia Ben Hamouda (1991, Milan) presents her solo exhibition About Telepathy and other Violences at ChertLüdde. Living between al-Qayrawan and Milan, her work reflects her dual Islamic and Christian heritage, sculpting calligraphic references that blend identity and meaning, specifically emphasizing aniconism in Islamic tradition.

On the floor of the exhibition, wood sculptures bandaged with cloth rest among twelve hanging steel sculptures to highlight the contrasts between the dynamic gestures and static pauses in their form.

Part of a personal shamanic process centered on recovery and resilience, the laser-cut steel sheets have been dressed with different spices and powders (chili, cumin, curry, henna, coconut charcoal, dried beetroot, salt). Cut into shapes that abstract traditional Islamic calligraphy, each of these works is composed of repeated layers, installed one behind the other to create the illusion of movement. The artist’s visual focus on representing movement is a reference to migration, manifesting allusions to the pilgrimage to Mecca and the Hajj’s stone-throwing ritual. Walking through the exhibition, the layers of steel sheets begin to reveal a figurative stone that moves through the pieces. 

Previously exhibited in 2021 at the gallery’s project space for emerging artists called Bungalow, Ben Hamouda joined the gallery in 2022 as a represented artist.

Italian painter Patrizio di Massimo unveils the art world’s most intimate yet universal moments in his upcoming solo exhibition titled Out Like a Light at ChertLüdde. Exploring the realms of portraiture, di Massimo presents curators and artist friends as his sleeping muses, creating whimsical and thought-provoking large-scale paintings that delve into art history and contemporary themes pertaining to identity, self-determination and recognition.

Born in 1983 in Jesi, di Massimo is a self-taught painter who made a radical shift from a multidisciplinary practice to focus exclusively on painting in 2015. Since then, portraiture has become the centerpiece of his artistic journey, characterized by a distinct compositional fantasy, Baroque-like drapery, and a fascination with personal appearances. His work embodies the vitality and enchanting details reminiscent of Italian cinema a la Fellini, evoking the extravagance of figurative painting.

Handmade Militancy presents largely unseen works by Clemen Parrocchetti (1923-2016, Milan) made during the most heated years of 1970s Italian feminism. Parrocchetti found her visual grammar in the materials of domestic labor – needles, spools, bobbins, cooking utensils, medicaments, textiles – repurposed into the subversive tools of denunciation and protest. Parrocchetti’s work speaks to women’s fights for equal pay, divorce bills and the right to abortion, issues that after almost half a century remain at the center of political debate. Handmade Militancy, the first exhibition of Parrocchetti’s work outside of Italy since her death, includes tapestries, assemblages, sewn drawings, a video and archival documentation the artist collected during her militant years. 

Parrocchetti trained at Milan’s Brera Fine Arts Academy while she was already a mother of five. From the early 1970s, Parrocchetti’s nascent feminist voice found expression in works she called “Objects of Feminine Culture,” which she exhibited in alternative art spaces in Milan. In 1978 she joined the feminist Gruppo Immagine of Varese, pioneering in conjugating art and feminist militancy, and showed with them at the 1978 Venice Biennale. While the group disbanded in the mid-1980s, Parrocchetti carried a feminist ethos in her artmaking for over five decades. 

Forsaking the conventional picture frame, the works on display critique and contest female subjugation and objectification, from within the confines of domesticity. The manifesto Memorandum for an Object of Female Culture (1973) presents inflammatory words of red thread painstakingly sutured onto an aluminum sheet for the “still sub-proletarian” woman “pin cushion/mattress/object.” With handmade tapestries, Parrocchetti marches on her call to resist submission and invoke women’s liberation. The title of each work (insistently resonant to this day) is a protest slogan: “Chastity Belt (Watch out for commodification),” “Under custody and repressed,” “Dreaming gender equality” and “Hope for Liberation after Resistance.” 

The exhibition is curated by Sofia Gotti and Caterina Iaquinta and it has been possible thanks to the collaboration of the Clemen Parrocchetti Archive. 

Born into a family of the Lombard aristocracy, Clemen Parrocchetti (1923-2016, Milan) trained in painting at the Brera Academy, which she graduated from in 1956. Across the 1960s, her painterly style shifted from an existentialist realism to an abstract and surreal language. While partaking in the feminist momentum of the early 1970s, her artistic practice underwent a radical change when she started to use textiles and small household objects in her early assemblages, but above all with the introduction of embroidery. In 1978 she joined the Gruppo Immagine of Varese, with which she participated in the 1978 Venice Biennale – a collaboration that lasted for almost all of the 1980s. Going further in her exploration of textiles and embroidery, the 1980s see her explore the themes of classical mythology with a sensitivity towards the metamorphosing body. In her final decade, Parrocchetti focused on the animal world and her relationship to it, formalized in numerous drawings and paintings.