Fresh Kiss, Pascale Marthine Tayou

Bottegantica Gallery, Milan

This exhibition, organized in collaboration with Galleria Continua, will see one of the most interesting personalities of the contemporary art world dialoguing with Italian nineteenth and twentieth century painting.

Pascale Marthine Tayou returns to Italy with a new and original project based on the interactive relationship between his works and Italian paintings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibition will come to Milan after opening at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, where contemporary sculptures and installations have contaminated the permanent collection of the American museum, composed mainly of antique paintings.

FRESH KISS aims to create a dialogue between the art collection of Bottegantica and the works of Tayou, designed specifically for the event in Milan. The dialectic between contemporary and past works is melded with the environment that hosts them, allowing the viewer to reflect on the concept of the continuity of art, fittings perfectly with the international nature of Milan and its historical and artistic stratification.

Born in Cameroon in 1966, Tayou started making his works in his home country and then moved to Germany, France and Belgium, where he currently resides. His art represents a natural bridge between African and European cultures, although his reach involves the entire world. This global vision has led Tayou to discover new perspectives of expression in which his identity as a man and as an artist is reflected. In his works, there is a prevailing interest in materials and their meanings, which can undergo semantic changes according to cultural, social, political and environmental conditioning. He has a predilection for recycling materials such as alabaster, crystal, plastic, wood, fabric and other media.