Milan, the debut of young Amaranta Medri, surreal and ironic artist

From May 6 to June 6, 2025, CARLOCINQUE Gallery in Milan becomes the venue for the first solo exhibition of the young artist Amaranta Medri, from Milan, born in 1995, who makes her debut with a mature and coherent project despite it being her first experience. The exhibition, entitled Postcards from Elsewhere. Homage to Domenico Gnoli, is developed as a double path that explores the ability of the image to transform the perception of reality, playing with different aesthetic codes - from photography to video art, from digital illustration to animation - but always traceable to a limpid, ironic and dreamy authorial language.

Divided into two main nuclei, the exhibition offers a layered and subtle reflection on the relationship between image and reality, between vision and narrative. The first nucleus, represented by the photographic series August in Greenland, places the viewer in an alienating dimension, where natural beauty blends with the disquietingness of a dissonant human presence. The photographs depict real icebergs, portrayed in an almost painterly light and digitally transformed into holiday settings: human figures appear suspended in these glacial settings, immersed in a pop aesthetic that contrasts violently with the sense of climatic alarm evoked by the landscape.

Digital intervention is not limited to editing the image but becomes a form of poetic montage. Amaranta Medri uses visual manipulation as a tool to question the viewer’s gaze, showing how much the iconography of our time - made of postcard images and prefabricated dreams - can generate distorted, even surreal readings of reality. Icebergs, symbols of our planet’s fragility, are thus transformed into backdrops for an unconscious collective play, in which the line between vacation and tragedy becomes thin, almost invisible.

Alongside the photographs, the second core of the exhibition consists of a series of videos that dialogue with the pictorial tradition of the Italian twentieth century. In particular, in the series Playing with Domenico Gnoli, the artist isolates and animates details taken from the famous works of Domenico Gnoli (Rome, 1933 - New York, 1970), resulting in short animated sequences in which the silhouettes move with lightness and irony. These painted fragments - ties, buttons, hair, cloth - come to life as silent actors, altering the fixity typical of painting to transform it into a narrative experience in motion. It is a game, but also a profound reflection on the identity of the image and how it is charged with meaning.

The dialogue with painting continues ideally with a reference to Tino Stefanoni (Lecco, 1937 - 2017), another master of Italian art known for his formal and conceptual minimalism. Indeed, the silhouettes that appear in Amaranta Medri’s videos evoke that same graphic essentiality, but transforming it into a narrative gesture. Where Stefanoni sought the archetype, Medri seeks the tale, the memory, the image that vibrates and breathes in the present time.

Among the most significant works in the exhibition is The World in Fire, a video with a strong visual and symbolic impact. Here, a war plane is slowly transformed into a paper airplane: a simple, almost childlike metamorphosis that nevertheless decisively overturns the sense of violence, suggesting a possible way of disarmament, not only material but also cultural. It is a pacifist gesture that does not shout, but whispers, capable of evoking questions rather than providing answers.

Amaranta Medri’s stylistic signature can be recognized precisely in this delicate, almost intimate approach to critical commentary. Her work does not impose theses, but opens spaces for reflection. Her images, made through a use of illustration, digital collage and animation, build suspended worlds, inhabited by light presences, ambiguous dreams, floating memories. There is in her a constant poetic tension, a desire to tell without ever simplifying, a conscious use of the visual medium as a tool for questioning rather than for representation.

Trained between Milan, London and New York, Amaranta Medri completed her studies in Graphic Design & Art Direction at the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York, also graduating with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Her international training is reflected in the eclecticism of her language and in her ability to dialogue with global visual codes without losing her rootedness in an Italian sensibility, visible especially in her connection with the figurative and narrative tradition.

Parallel to his artistic activity, Medri works as a freelancer in the field of visual communication for international brands, managing to maintain an autonomous and distinctive line of research. In 2021 she was awarded the New Post Photography prize at the MIA Fair with the project Drone Alphabet, which already showed an interest in visual synthesis and the critical use of the image, while in the video art section of the Art Rights prize she came second, thus consolidating a rising exhibition path.

Amaranta Medri’s style, ironic but not sarcastic, dreamy but never evasive, stands out for its ability to address complex issues - such as climate change, cultural memory, war - with an apparent lightness that hides an authentic depth. His works seem to speak softly, with that delicacy typical of stories that stay with us the longest, because they did not impose a truth, but left a space to think about it.

Milan, the debut of young Amaranta Medri, surreal and ironic artist

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