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Solo Exhibition at Museo Nazionale di Villa Pisani, Stra (Venice)
July 17th/30th 2010
TEXTS
Architecure and Its Double by Laura Cherubini, July 2010
A figure floats up into the blue and towards the skylights, above the heads of the viewers. The image depicts one of the works by Mila Dau in which two systems of signs are superimposed. A liquid layer of rarefied monochromatic color is superimposed onto the architectural structure of a museum. In this case, the female nude that levitates upwards has been added on. The work seems like a synthesis of the themes of Mila Dau’s paintings.
When Mila Dau, a painter of figures, arrived in New York, she took on portraiture with the series titled Face to Face, completed in 2005. Dau set some parameters for the portraits because limits can stimulate the act of painting. First of all, the format had to be the same for all, and then the time: all portraits had to be done in one hour. “I have become a different kind of painter. In that one hour, both the sitter and I were very focused on the experience at hand”...(read all...)
Face to Face With Mila Dau by Claudia Conforti, July 2010
The Museo Nazionale di Villa Pisani in Stra is an extraordinary masterpiece of villa architecture built at the end of the Baroque period and it has an extraordinary garden, which is famous for its monumental labyrinth of greenery. Built along the Brenta Canal in the 18th century by the Pisani family, powerful Venetian patricians, the building had two designers: the first was Gerolamo Frigimelica, an aristocrat and a talented amateur architect from Padua, who left wooden maquettes of his design, today housed in the Museo Correr in Venice and in the Cooper-Hewitt in New York. We owe the magnificent main building block with its double courtyards to the architect Francesco Maria Preti who took over from Frigimelica. The building is still fitted with the villa’s ancient furnishings and displays brightly painted rooms and the famous frescoes of Giambattista Tiepolo depicting The Glory of the Pisani Family in the ballroom. For years the villa, whose size and magnificence put it on a par with other European royal residences, has promoted and housed exhibitions of contemporary artists, in the attempt to renew a creative continuity that seems at times to be missing.
The current show, which opened on July 17th, outlines two decades in the creative journey of Mila Dau, a talented Italian-Canadian architect and artist who has lived and worked in New York for the last twenty years....(read all...)
