Nicolas Pallavicini | Emiliano Coletta
May 24 – July 18, 2025
Opening: May 23, 2025
Quittenbaum Gallery, Theresienstr. 58 Munich
The exhibition DISTANT INVENTIONS invites to engage with moments of recollection. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s reflections, the essence of things has withdrawn into elusive realms. Nicolas Pallavicini and Emiliano Coletta explore the forms these things can assume when viewed through the distancing lens of memory—an artistic dialogue between painting and sculpture.
For Nicolas Pallavicini, born in 1976 in Buenos Aires, landscape serves as a central motif—one that he stages as a metaphor for the heightened disorientation experienced by the contemporary viewer. In his large-scale canvases, Pallavicini deconstructs vistas into fragmented elements, disassembles horizons, and employs abstraction and collage to ultimately achieve a remarkably cohesive synthesis of detail. His compositions oscillate between spatial depth and surface brilliance. Employing a technique of his own invention, he removes segments of the painted surface like transfers, exposing the raw canvas beneath. In doing so, he confronts the viewer with the constructed nature of illusion in painting, using the medium itself to evoke awareness of the ephemeral, the authentic, and the deceptive.
Emiliano Coletta, RUFA lectirer, born 1974 in Rome, works primarily in sculpture, a medium through which he conveys individual emotional experience and complex poetic, philosophical, and socio-critical ideas. In Munich, we present a compelling range of his ceramic works—conceptual yet corporeal—created through a physically intense process involving forceful, sometimes aggressive gestures. Clay is shaped, thrown, pinched, and modeled into sculptural entities marked by a dynamic tension between architectural grounding and expressively charged torsos and heads. His Bagatelle series originated from unfinished student works, which he transformed, imbuing them with new, completed identities. Coletta’s experimental use of vivid glazes and subtle chromatic nuances intensifies both the expressive power and the sculptural tactility of his pieces. For the exhibition DISTANT INVENTIONS, Coletta immersed himself in the literary world of Dada artists Hugo Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings, drawing on their diaries and poetry. Their escapist and anarchic visions resonate throughout his sculptures—consciously echoed within our present moment, shaped by the specter of war and the absurd theater of global politics.
