↳ Exhibitions

Ad Minoliti at MASS MoCA

June 25, 2020

Artist: Ad Minoliti

Exhibition title: Fantasías Modulares

Curated by: Isabel Casso

Venue: MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, US

Date: March 13 – October 18, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, MASS MoCA, Peres Projects and Crèvecoeur

Note: Exhibition guide is available here

Grinning triangles, lounging cows, and winking circles populate the vibrant, queer landscapes of Ad Minoliti’s imagined worlds. Trained as a painter, Minoliti draws on the rich legacy of geometric abstraction in her native country, Argentina, where geometry was used as a tool for picturing utopian alternatives. By combining abstraction with playful figuration, Minoliti upends familiar fairy tales, turning them on their head. She is particularly interested in disrupting pictorial cultural norms that uphold traditional views of sexuality and gender.

The artist sees many of these cultural norms established in the formative stories of childhood. In contrast to these indoctrinations, Minoliti uses her work to picture alternate realities free of biases by utilizing diverse, colorful, and playful hybrid forms. Her characters are non-binary, challenging the usual categories of male and female, and also blurring boundaries between human, animal, and machine. Her work frequently unsettles anthropocentric views of the world and allows hierarchies between humans and non-humans to dissolve. Working in both two and three dimensions, and between the vocabularies of painting, sculpture, architecture, and design, the artist also collapses traditional categories in art history to harness a more capacious and fluid language. This activation of other beings, entities, and otherwise inanimate objects generates a multitude of possibilities — joyful, colorful, and inviting of a more inclusive world.