soloshow @ Galleria Patricia Armocida | Milano

Opening: 28.01.25 | 7pm

Galleria Patricia Armocida is happy to announce “My Happy Place”, a solo exhibition by Katharina Arndt opening on Tuesday January 28, 2025 at 7:00 pm.

Katharina Arndt, who grew up in East Germany, remembers the thrilling kaleidoscope of consumerism that ensued after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Recollecting her first childhood visit to the West, she said: “I remember all the colors and I don’t know how many different kinds of chocolate bars.” Arndt acts as an outside observer: her quick, colorful paintings satirize the mass consumerist aesthetic of our contemporary society, reflecting on daily life in the digital age. Her works, with their lively and whimsical subjects, conceal traces of an unfiltered reality, reminding viewers that the images we are presented with are often moments captured out of context, constructed to be shared.
Perhaps even more powerful than the “real” life Arndt smuggles into her paradisal scenes, are the painful realities lurking beyond the frame. In the same warm Mediterranean water where many of her subjects play, refugees struggle and suffer in unprecedented numbers.
The plastic cups that girls drink cheap mojitos from on the beach will find their way into oceans or landfills. A devastating war is waged on the same continent as the sunbathing European tourists she depicts.
In Arndt’s paintings, life’s fleeting pleasures are met with enthusiasm and gratitude, but always held in tension with the uneven way they are experienced, both in our personal lives and in respect to our broader privilege.
The artist’s intent is not to denigrate the hedonistic escapism of her subjects, but rather to implicate herself in the complex dynamics she interrogates in her work by inserting herself as a subject in many of her paintings. Representing „islands of respite,“ moments of lightness in the chaotic and complicated dynamics of life.
To see both the joy and the irony that are woven into the little moments of levity that act as a means of relief from the troubling realities of life. Brief moments when we can be free of our daily anxieties, both big and small, and find a way to embrace it all in its dissonant fullness.
“My hope for my work is that people smile and have the opportunity to reflect about the superficiality of it all. That’s my goal.”

INSTALLATION SHOTS

coming

available artworks

please contact the Gallery for more detailed informations, info@galleriapatriciaarmocida.com

Duration

29.01. – 07.03.25
From Tuesday to Saturday: 11.30 am – 7.00 pm

Location

GALLERIA PATRICA ARMOCIDA
Via Argelati n° 24 | 20143 Milano (MI)

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