Joanna Kirk

Ciocca Arte Contemporanea, Milan
Through July 28

English artist Joanna Kirk’s first individual exhibition reveals the strong tie between her artistic experience and the simplicity of autobiographical situations lived poetically. In the past, she used photographs taken to her husband to document the stages and moments of her existence, like her pregnancy, for example.

Now Kirk utilizes pastels on paper, an artistic technique that possesses neither the immediacy nor speed of photography, but within whose boundaries she continues to illustrate the same autobiographical direction. On small, white pages, through designs meticulously colored and executed, fragments of reality emerge and come to life, intended to reconstruct a springtime walk in a park taken by the artist with her seven-month-old baby girl.

The images are displayed two by two and continually present the face or nape of her daughter, accompanied from time to time by the profile of a small gothic church, a lighted park bench, or a bud of magnolia. The formal and imaginative diptych hopes to disclose the dual point of view of a mother and a child on the verge of discovering worldly objects.

Through her drawings, the artist attempts to portray the innocence of visual discovery, possibly motivated by the interrogative tradition regarding how the eyes of a child can perceive the reality around them. The drawings appear like illustrations of an interior tranquility that not only belong to the infantile dimension by also to the artist herself. The equilibrium and precision of the shots of various elements of the park and the attention to the movements of the baby’s tiny head – at times awake, at times asleep – betray the unicity of Kirk’s vision. This oneness, through its accurate selection of colors and graphically precise strokes, reinterprets the immediacy and fragmentation of infantile attention.




Paola Noé
Translation by Cortney Price