For their first major solo exhibition Ad Minoliti will convert the galleries of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires into a Soft Museum. Introducing us to fifteen years of work, Minoliti recreates and combines their pieces throughout the museum to make one big play area. Their paintings, murals and installations establish a vivid imaginative world fed by their fascination with abstraction, eroticism, architecture and design.
Based on their readings of feminist and queer theory, Minoliti presents a vision of people and society in which the binary male/female dynamic has no place, fully aware of the power of images to create a reality that transcends traditional cultural patterns. Through colourful murals, sweet characters and animated paintings, the artist concentrates on altering aspects of western culture that in the past were considered opposites: spiritual and rational, nature and culture, seriousness and frivolity, masculine and feminine. Rethinking these oppositions as they relate to art, Minoliti emphasizes the strength of concepts often disdained in the modern world: childhood, sweetness and softness. By re-evaluating these sensibilities, Minoliti questions the ways in which the history of art is written, its roll-call of heroes, and the very nature of the image as the world knows it.
With its welcoming atmosphere, Soft Museum also seeks to break down other barriers and hierarchies. The paintings, in addition to being objects to be viewed, offer shelter to small animals, as seen in Play C coloreadas (Colourful Play C), or dress the characters Fox, Cat and Bear who wander the galleries along with the visitors. Meanwhile, the installations, which feature artworks from the Moderno collection, remove the distinctions between paintings, objects and animated creatures, as seen in Dollhouse and also murals such as Pompis, which play with space and dimensions to highlight the relationship between what is contained within the museum and what is left outside. And so Soft Museum presents a utopian, peaceful fiction where visitors can come in, read and rest among paintings and friendly characters.
Also operating at the museum will be the Feminist School of Painting. Designed to be both an installation and an active classroom, Minoliti has created an educational space populated with murals of friendly characters where, with the help of Argentine artists and cultural theorists, they will take a critical look at iconic works from the history of painting. The School… will offer classes for people of all ages, hosting debates on a variety of topics ranging from the lack of representation of people of African descent in the history of art to the need to deconstruct normative representations of bodies.
Soft Museum is a declaration of principles in which Minoliti uses painting to create a spectacle, aware of the enormous value such an exhibition can have in cultivating habits and practices, emotions and the ways in which pleasure is produced.
Ad Minoliti (Buenos Aires, 1980) studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón with Diana Aisenberg and the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas. They co-founded the collective PintorAs in 2009 and have held residencies at Gasworks/URRA, London, FRAC Pays De La Loire, France, Casa Wabi, Mexico, and the Kadist Foundation in San Francisco. Their work has been exhibited at different institutions in Los Angeles, Puerto Rico, London, San Francisco, Berlin, Mexico City, New York, Miami and Paris, among other cities and they have taken part in the Mercocur Biennial in Porto Alegre, the Aichi Triennial in Japan and the Front Cleveland Triennial in the USA. In 2019, they took part in the 58th Venice Biennale.
This exhibition is supported by:
