Young American artist Amy Bravo on display at Poggiali's in Milan.

The Milan branch of Galleria Poggiali welcomes Congratulations Hero!!!, a solo exhibition by young U.S. artist Amy Bravo, class of 1997, which can be visited from Jan. 18, 2024 at the space in Foro Buonaparte 52, in downtown Milan. Bravo’s work is distinguished by her ability to explore the intertwining of personal identity, family heritage and symbolism through a peculiar artistic technique involving painting, drawing and assemblage of heirlooms charged with emotional lift.

The exhibition offers for the first time in Italy an in-depth look at the artist’s work. Deconstructing personal emotions linked to her own complex family lineage, Bravo weaves a thread that reconnects her to her Italian-Cuban origins. The works in the exhibition trace her personal odyssey of resilience and deconstruction, made up of perpetual attempts to make aspects of her own personality coexist with a fragmented family history and returning to the public the nuances, behaviors and weaknesses that are typically human.

The title of the exhibition, Congratulations Hero!!!, plays with the artist’s last name, “Bravo,” a term characterized by polyvalent meaning: in Latin, “hero”; in the Middle Ages, “the villain,” or even the murderer. This oxymoronic valence animates the character of the female characters who inhabit Bravo’s works: avatars of herself in a combative, heroic version, whose details betray her apparent invincible nature.

Congratulations Hero!!! is also the name of the key work on display in the exhibition, where a mythological female figure raises her gloves in victory. The work captures the post-conflict moment, exploring the meaning of victory in complex relationships and the mixed emotions that come with it. A contemporary Nike who won in the last round: proud, winged and finally provided with a crown, but also sweaty and stained with the blood of blows struck and suffered.

The exhibition project investigates the theme of “victory” in a lost battle, exploring its emotional consequences and the subsequent need for confrontation and reconciliation, a concept that encompasses the artist’s entire body of work. Fomento Nike and Retablo a Carlos, for example, reveal his particular approach in exploring the boundaries of human experience through mythical symbolism, familiar archetypes, and queer iconography. By carefully choosing symbolic materials and objects, Bravo has created a personal parallel cosmos inhabited by characters living in a purgatory-like dimension and historically significant symbols such as the Black Rooster, the Black Lake, and the saddle.

If Bravo’s previous exhibition in Paris represented struggle, Congratulations Hero!!! wants to present a new chapter dedicated to victory, a feeling too often trivialized, characterized by an extreme complexity of emotions, including a sense of the end, emptiness, sadness, resentment and distance. In the catalog accompanying the exhibition, the artist reveals how the gestation of these works is fueled by grief, a catalyst that recently prompted her to explore stories of her Italian family, bringing to light a new dimension of her inherited heritage. This exhibition represents an important point in her personal and artistic journey: by showing the public her personal emotional baggage, Amy Bravo offers a broader look at dynamics typical of family systems, revealing deep connections that link the personal to the political.

For all information, you can visit Poggiali Gallery’s official website.

Young American artist Amy Bravo on display at Poggiali's in Milan.

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