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.

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.

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