Antonini Milano, in collaboration with Galleria P420 in Bologna, announces the opening of the solo exhibition by Shafei Xia (Shaoxing, China, 1989) in Palazzo Borromeo, Milan. The exhibition Principessa Shafei, set up in the spaces adjacent to the hall with extraordinary 15th-century frescos, presents a series of new paintings on sandalwood paper, made by the artist for this occasion. Shafei is also debuting a cycle of glazed ceramic sculptures made during her very recent residency at Museo Carlo Zauli in Faenza.
Having recently graduated from the Fine Arts Academy of Bologna with a project titled The World is the Circus, reformulating the famous phrase of Federico Fellini, and having successfully held her first solo exhibition, with the title Welcome to My Show at P4202, Shafei Xia brings her extraordinary world to Milan for the first time, a world where dreams and reality, childhood and adulthood, play and eroticism blend in a multitude of images and characters. “The main theme of her works is love,” writes Maura Pozzati, “experienced as desire, jealousy and violence, represented in an explicit or a symbolic way, depending on the circumstances, but omnipresent in any case.” “I paint what happens in everyday life and what I see and experience in my dreams. The basic themes of my life are eating, drinking and having fun. Life gives us everything, so why not have fun?” The complexity of her imagination lies here, in the apparently simple words of the artist, and like life it never ceases to amaze us.
