VENICE.- On the occasion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbati Gallery is presenting two new exhibitions conceived especially for the spaces inside Palazzo Lezze in Campo Santo Stefano, Venice.

For her first exhibition in Europe, Los Angeles-based artist Tara Walters (b. 1990, Washington D.C.) has produced a series of new paintings titled Sailing for the Garden Party, displayed in the rooms on the Fist Floor.

Walters’ paintings are imbued with sea water, sand and sea shell dust that give the works a subtle and mystical luminescence, capturing the fleeting language of our intuition and memory using elements of the physical world, the starting point of our mind and spirit’s voyages. The colourful dream-like works disguise a profound search for meaning behind the apparent naivety of the subjects; painted air balloons and starry skies reminiscent of childhood become a hypertext that transports the viewer to a liminal state between memory and fantasy.

The title of the exhibition references Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party”, an allegoric view of life and death through the distorted lense of one’s perspective on the meaning of reality, which inspired Tara’s works and the following poem:

A map, a sign, be it a shooting star or rainbow
reaffirming that you are on the right course.
a guiding light pulling you in closer and closer
until you land on a bee encrusted air balloon
symbolizing the ever source keeping this garden alive.
be it a nuisance or a gift,
if you disrespect it prepare to be stung.
ouch! goes the naive one.
while those who acknowledge its presence
remain in the pure bliss of the everlasting garden party.

Tara Walters, 2023

In contrast with Tara Walters’ works, Nicholas Gardner (b.1988) and Saša Štucin (b.1984) from design duo Soft Baroque will present Inox Detox, a new series of objects inspired by their reflection on the quiet omnipresence of the standard stainless steel tubes.

The stainless steel handrail has become a ubiquitous silver worm in institutions and homes, it is an object that strives to have no aesthetic, practically and culturally sterile in its function. As material, it represents the pervasiveness of a certain brand of corporate modernism, desperate to create value without offense or provocation, a hollow snake silently constricting stairways and balconies indefinitely. In the Inox Detox series, the standard stainless steel tubes are manipulated, rotary laser cut and bent, to offer a new perspective on its conventional connotations and use, as certain architectural and hardware practices seem to have reached a dead end.

Soft Baroque’s study of the stainless steel form breathes visual poetry and a new future by interrupting, twisting and reshaping an object we have become so accustomed to that it has seemingly become overlooked and creatively obsolete.