Standing knee-deep in brackish water as dark as iodine, two stocky women, closely resembling each other and completely naked, have their backs turned to us. Their arms hang slack along their sides in a very relaxed pose that wraps their bones in unmoving shadow and highlights their mature, voluptuous buttocks, firm and knobby as quinces. Their hair is gathered into buns pinned at the nape of their necks, their gazes fixed on a secret, private, unknowable landscape. They are unquestionably unconcerned with reality. Aloof and absorbed in their own leisure, the two modest bathers that Nicolas Party has drawn in charcoal on the white-plastered walls of the kaufmann repetto gallery, in a style evocative of Guercino or a certain vein of nineteenth-century painting, are the nude horizon for the first solo show by this Brussels-based Swiss artist—appropriately titled “Two Naked Women.” These portraits function as a sort of classical, nostalgic backdrop, which imbues the about fifteen works on view with a rarefied, languorous mood, warding off any impatience or haste. These works are for the most part pastel on canvas (all dated 2015, and of slow gestation), whose literal titles—Portrait, Still Life, Landscape—betray a keen interest in certain tropes and stylistic …

A spotlight can transform quite a bit with an economy of means, making something instantly visible, no matter how small or familiar. Post-winter sunlight can achieve a similar effect, which is why “The Spring Awakening” was an apt title choice for the program of exhibitions, openings, and performances organized around this year’s miart fair. Although everything under its purview was already on the urban map, miart’s new ventures made the local network of artists, institutions, and galleries look fresher and more energetic, signaling a positive shift within the cultural sphere. Milan’s contemporary art scene seems to be finally catching up with the success of the city’s annual furnishing design bash Salone Internazionale del Mobile, perhaps by emulating its three-part format: a serious fair to busy one’s self for half the day; a range of things to see about town for the other half; and a wide array of social gatherings. On Friday night at 1 a.m., when I stopped by at the Ulrico Hoepli Planetarium to see Stan VanDerBeek’s Cine Dreams: Future Cinema of The Mind (1972/2014)—an immersive installation of over 50 16mm films and slide projections presented for the first time in its entirety since its premiere—the queue outside …

The raw material of Thea Djordjadze’s work is memory—of past times, faraway places, and emotions. “Oxymoron Grey”—her new (and second) solo show at Milan’s kaufmann repetto gallery—seems to illustrate this idea entirely and intimately. The exhibition’s title may allude to the “oxymoronic” nature of her art, which hovers between painting and sculpture, completeness and fragmentation, materiality and pure energy. Much like her sculptures, grey is the hue of what is vague, undefinable. It is also the color of the cold Soviet buildings in Georgia, which are vividly engrained in the memory of the artist, who was born in Tbilisi and now lives in Berlin. The first room hosts a delicate, elegant composition of sculptures and wall assemblages. In its form, the installation recalls a bedroom, or rather the “essence” of a bedroom. Two squared, steel beds (the small one perhaps the prototype of a crib) lie on the floor, beside an odd coat rack rendered in a pseudo-Bauhaus style; hung on the walls are a series of painted, cut rugs, a blue, varnished shelf-like box, and a kind of abstract tableau made with polished steel, clay, and paper maché. This last one—called Untitled (2013), like all the other pieces on show—is …

Blame it on Pippi Longstocking and a 70s-style, girl-power upbringing, but as a kid I too dreamt of living alone with a clever white horse called Old Man whom I could lift up with a finger. I refused to take too seriously the circus of adults who pretended to have a say about me. The idea of being boxed in by rules was insufferable. All those riotous feelings came back with a bang while visiting Judith Hopf’s solo show at kaufmann repetto, her first in Italy. Hopf’s evocation of horses and tigers—however tame or ironic—prompted an instinctive longing for freedom, a longing from all the prescriptive grammars of seeing and reacting to Art. An allergy to orders is, I guess, one of the reasons why the world of (caged, trained) animals is often such a sensitive subject for women artists—I could draw a long list here, from the great 19th century animalière painter Rosa Bonheur to Simone Forti’s choreographies inspired by her observations at the zoo, and Rosemarie Trockel, with her raucous motto, “Every animal is a female artist,” as a provocative response to Beuys’s “Jeder Mensch [ist] ein Künstler.” What I found most enticing, however, is that Hopf stages her …