miart

at Allianz MiCo, Pavilion 3
viale Scarampo, Milan

Thursday, April 11, 11 AM – 9 PM  VIP preview upon invitation
Friday, April 12, 11: 30 AM – 8 PM
Saturday, April 13, 11: 30 AM – 8 PM
Sunday, April 14, 11 AM – 7 PM

For miart 2024, Bel Ami presents a solo booth with new portraits by UK-based artist, Alexis Soul-Gray. Alexis Soul-Gray’s unique process combining painting, drawing and collage allows her to performatively investigate how imagination illuminates a pathway forward through sadness and loss. Soul-Gray shows how curiosity and experimentation peel back hidden layers, revealing the emotional life of childhood and how it conditions our perceptions and responses into adulthood.

Appropriating imagery from Italian Renaissance painting and advertisements idealizing family life from popular British magazines, Soul-Gray finds tableaus of women and children, choosing them for their artificial quality, “where family is often faked but also, somehow felt.” She then delicately draws out eerie moments that seem unexpectedly real, for example, a backward glance or a playful gesture. To break through the surface of these staged and stylized arrangements, Soul-Gray obliterates the facade by rubbing, scraping, or even using caustic chemicals like bleach. She paints over or collages the figures in an attempt to reconstitute their unstudied, piercing humanity. As the washed-away images become more transparent, the reassuring texture of the canvas, linen, or paper shines through. Through luminescent veils of blue and gold, Soul-Gray’s children, trapped in a vision of the past, suddenly rise to the surface with a burst of lifelike realism.

For miart, Soul-Gray will paint a new series of seven small portraits of women and children, referencing the delicate connection between the madonna and child. The paintings will hang on walls painted a Cobalt blue, symbolizing purity in Renaissance painting. In Alexis Soul-Gray’s work, this same blue becomes the color for processing grief and arriving at a new place.