Exhibition · Artopia Gallery · Milano
Artopia is delighted to inaugurate, on Thursday 8 October, the new exhibition season 2026–2027 with the group show “Lupo lupo, che ore sono?”, curated by Gioele Melandri, featuring the artists Bekhbaatar Enkhtur (Ulaanbaatar, 1994), Eleonora Mariani (Carate Brianza, 1994), Vincenzo Simone (Seraing, 1980), Giuseppe Urciuolo (Benevento, 2000) and Arianna Zama (Lugo, 1998). The exhibition project explores the subtle relationship between children’s play, artistic creation and power dynamics. The title, inspired by a phrase repeatedly used during a kids’ game, serves as a narrative pretext and suggests an exhibition layout that engages in close dialogue with the gallery’s architecture and the various viewing mechanisms it offers. The ground floor of the gallery is surrounded by a series of paintings. The artists on display share a specific methodological affinity: the work of Eleonora Mariani, Vincenzo Simone, Giuseppe Urciuolo and Arianna Zama employs painting as a catalyst, a vehicle for giving form to obsession and desire towards a scene or an object, conveying its essence through a personal and intuitive mode of perception that is not without its own internal rules. For these artists, the very act of painting takes the form of an exercise in possession, an almost primordial attempt to tame and dominate the world in order to make it tangibly comprehensible and, in some way, even manageable. Meanwhile, at the centre of the space is exhibited a sculpture, created specifically for the exhibition, by the artist Bekhbaatar Enkhtur. Through a clearly anti-monumental approach, the work renounces any pretence of superiority within the exhibition layout. Rather than positioning itself as the linchpin around which everything revolves, Enktur’s animal figure seems instead to be succumbing to the pressure of its surroundings, intimidated and cornered by the collective force of the selection of paintings set against it. It is a perceptual short-circuit in which the predator…