Zina Gallery is pleased to present Caves,Crevices,Cavities, Lorena Cocioni’s first exhibition with the gallery. All the displayed works are part of a new series, further expanding the artist’s practice where ceramics and site-specific installations meet, using glazed stoneware as well as various other materials, such as wood and steel.

Caves,Crevices,Cavities is Cocioni’s latest installment in her research into ideas that frame femininity as a duality of inside and outside spaces. The solo show explores one main subject: women as producers of spectacle or as spectacle themselves across history. Pointing to women’s corporeality within domestic confinement, to the hidden  and intimate makeup rituals seen as acts of claiming power, and to bodily insides as physical grounds, the works engage the visitor in a skin-permeating glare.

Cocioni conducts a mise-en-scène of bodily cavities, body parts, and cells constructed as furniture and furnishings, visible and invisible mirrors, under a gradually intensifying light. Within this setting, the line between subject and object is blurred and the role of the viewer constantly changes. The works guide eyes and steps through space, anatomically decorticating the male gaze and unmasking the expected masquerade. Beyond a delicate privacy of curtains lie these caves, crevices, and cavities, a de/constructed female body.

Artist

Lorena Cocioni (b.1995) lives and works in Bucharest. In her practice, she often uses the body senses and the ritual component of everyday actions, such as washing, combing hair, (un)dressing and taking care of the body. From the use of delicate pink hues, feathers, toiletry soaps to glass and metal shapes, she brings together different materials alongside her ceramics. She plays with them creating apparently fragile, yet very consistent works that resemble an almost ancient past, as well as a blurred future. She has exhibited in galleries and art spaces such as Ivan Gallery, Rubik, Suprainfinit, Another Mobile Gallery.