Blog | COMBAT ART REVIEW

UNIQUE Returns to Milan: New Visions of Abstraction with Annie Shead and William Van Hoorn

UNIQUE returns to Milan, the exhibition project conceived and curated by Bruno Gnocchi to give visibility to new generations of artists through short-term experimental interventions.

Storiellette_VOGA Art Project_cover image blank — Annie Shead, Front garden, 80x80, 2025

Following its first edition in 2025, UNIQUE renews its collaboration with the historic gallery Antonia Jannone Disegni di Architettura, which from 24 to 26 January 2026 will host the works of two young British artists: Annie Shead and William Van Hoorn. The opening is scheduled for Friday 23 January at 6:00 pm, at Corso Garibaldi 125 in Milan.

UNIQUE was conceived as a concise format designed to enhance the intensity of the encounter between artwork and viewer, proposing an alternative mode of engagement compared to the extended timelines of traditional exhibitions. The project focuses on a small selection of works, encouraging close observation and a direct relationship with the artists’ creative processes. In this sense, the gallery becomes an almost laboratory-like space, where research unfolds before the viewer’s eyes.

For this second chapter, Bruno Gnocchi brings together two artistic practices that, while rooted in different languages, share a deep reflection on abstraction and on the relationship between matter, gesture and image. William Van Hoorn, born in London in 2000, develops a painterly practice that weaves together concrete abstraction from the second half of the twentieth century with organic and symbolic references drawn from diverse cultural contexts. His canvases are crossed by living forms that disrupt geometric structures and minimalist grids, generating an unstable balance between order and impulse, control and chromatic memory.

Figlio_di_gazza_2023,_Matèria_Roma_Photo_Roberto Apa — William Van Hoorn, No title- Oil on Hessian Jute, 140 x 120

Annie Shead, born in London in 2002, works with what she defines as machine paintings: works that originate from the rituality of textile labour. Visible stitches, thread tension, errors and repetitions transform domestic objects and surfaces into essential compositions, where fabric becomes skin and the artisanal gesture acquires a sculptural dimension. Colour and rhythm replace the brushstroke, giving rise to images in which material itself carries meaning.

The dialogue between Shead and Van Hoorn unfolds in the subtle space between structure and unpredictability. In Van Hoorn’s works, organic forms undermine geometric order; in Shead’s, matter itself destabilises modular systems. Both artists, however, explore abstraction as a tool to create open images capable of conveying the tensions and complexities of the present.

Galleria Antonia Jannone Disegni di Architettura

Corso Garibaldi 125, Milano

24 - 26 gennaio 2026

STORIELLETTE. Gianni D’Urso and Giuseppe De Mattia at VOGA Art Project

From 28 December 2025 to 22 February 2026, VOGA Art Project presents STORIELLETTE, a two-person exhibition by Gianni D’Urso and Giuseppe De Mattia, the third and final chapter of the 2025 exhibition cycle devoted to dialogue between two artists.

Curated by VOGA Art Project, the exhibition opens on Saturday, 27 December at 7:00 pm in the spaces at via Francesco Curzio dei Mille 58, Bari, and unfolds as a fragmented yet incisive reflection on the present.

The title explicitly refers to Sturiellet by Andrea Pazienza, the iconic collection of short everyday stories, autobiographical flashes and ironic observations of reality. In a similar vein, STORIELLETTE constructs a mosaic of minimal, discontinuous narratives, bringing together Giuseppe De Mattia’s Cronache vere and Gianni D’Urso’s I ragazzi stanno bene series. The result is a sequence of episodes that speak of social disillusionment, existential precarity, failed escapes and small defeats, observed with a lucid, never complacent gaze.

Giuseppe De Mattia presents a layered imaginary that intertwines personal memory, popular traditions and a sharp critique of the art system. Through photography, drawing and audiovisual media, the artist builds ironic and incisive narrative devices capable of exposing the economic, political and exhibition dynamics that shape the cultural world. His practice moves along the boundary between folk art and conceptual approaches, maintaining a strong connection to collective experience and everyday life.

Gianni D’Urso responds with works that emerge from collected materials, pre-existing images and manipulated objects, creating visual short circuits where play, dream and disillusion coexist. His research investigates the fragility of the human condition, staging an unstable and precarious reality marked by semantic and poetic shifts. Precarity, failure and irony thus become tools for observing the present without rhetoric, yet with a subtle critical tension.

Paintings, drawings and sculptures are presented alongside a site-specific sound installation created collaboratively by the two artists, forming an archive of notes, voices and sensations. STORIELLETTE unfolds as an open-ended narrative that oscillates between melancholy and irony, offering an acute and resilient взгляд at the cracks of our time.

VOGA Art Project

Via Francesco Curzio dei Mille 58, 70123, Bari

28 dicembre - 22 febbraio 2026

MACBA Celebrates 30 Years of Its Collection with Like a Dance of Starlings

On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, MACBA presents Like a Dance of Starlings. MACBA Collection: Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being, an exhibition that offers a deep and unconventional rereading of the museum’s collection.

Views from the exhibition "Like a Dance of Starlings: MACBA Collection — Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being". Photo: Miquel Coll, 2025

On view until 28 September 2026, the exhibition constructs a collective narrative that challenges the concepts of the individual and the community, fostering an open dialogue between artists from different generations, languages and cultural contexts.

Far removed from any chronological structure or celebratory intent, the exhibition brings together two hundred works by around fifty artists. Many of these are being shown at MACBA for the first time, while a significant number have entered the collection only recently. Curated by Clàudia Segura and Núria Montclús, the exhibition takes on a fluid, rhizomatic form inspired by the flight of starlings: unstable images, continuous transformations and relationships that form and dissolve, generating new constellations of meaning.

The exhibition opens with the black-and-white portraits from Fotomatón by Onofre Bachiller, produced between 1986 and 2000 in Barcelona’s nightlife venues. This extensive photographic archive portrays a city shaped by desire, fluid identities and social transformation, documenting the rise of club culture, LGBTQ+ communities and a nocturnal Barcelona that defies norms and hierarchies. The images function as a collective performance, a choral portrait of subjectivities in motion.

The exhibition unfolds across five thematic fields that explore contemporary processes of subject formation. In Inhabiting Borders, the works address identity as a porous and unstable construction shaped by gender, body, race and social class. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ocaña and Tony Oursler challenge the notion of a unified subject, foregrounding liminal existences that have long been marginalised.

In Existing Through the Flesh, the body emerges as the primary site of experience and knowledge. Works by Àngels Ribé and others reveal identity as an embodied, performative and situated process, constantly shaped by its environment.

The journey then expands in Vibrating in Nature, where subjectivity is understood as a network of relationships connecting humans, the environment and spirituality. In works such as Sonhos Yanomami by Claudia Andujar, human existence appears inseparable from the breath of the forest, part of a shared and sacred ecosystem.

MACBA

Plaça dels Àngels, 1, Ciutat Vella, 08001 Barcelona

Fino al 28 Settembre 2026

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