HI IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR HELLO
January 10–February 14, 2020
KALEIDOSCOPE is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition in Italy by Tobias Spichtig (Swiss, b.1982) at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan. The show HI IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR HELLO—featuring a series of new paintings and a site-specific installation of disused electric appliances—expands on Spichtig’s ongoing fascination with environmental interventions, conceived as claustrophobic scenarios where the viewer feels like an intruder.
Inspired by tattoos, typography and ornaments, Spichtig’s paintings investigate the duality of the sign, intended both as global and personal at the same time. The canvases—deriving from vinyl prints of appropriated images and iPhone shots heat pressed onto the surface and subsequently painted with oil—investigate the nature of the painting as the ultimate luxury: an image that will last forever.
Spichtig’s works are often installed in spaces that he fills wall-to-wall with multiples of a single type of domestic consumer good—mattresses, kitchen tables, refrigerators, couches—so that the paintings themselves are partially blocked from the visitor’s view. In his exhibition at Spazio Maiocchi, the artist will incorporate a wall of second-hand air conditioners, a discarded commodity chosen for the immaterial, invisible quality of its task: transforming air and energy.
A billboard commission in the courtyard of Spazio Maiocchi will complete the exhibition.
KALEIDOSCOPE is today’s most innovative magazine of contemporary art and visual culture, founded in 2009 at the core of a creative studio with a distinctly curatorial and interdisciplinary approach. Since October 2017, KALEIDOSCOPE’s studio and exhibition space are hosted by Spazio Maiocchi in Milan.
Spazio Maiocchi is a social space where art, design and fashion blend to shape new cultural experiences. Originating from the convergence of visionary founding partners Carhartt WIP and Slam Jam, Spazio Maiocchi presents a cross-disciplinary program of exhibitions and events in a former-industrial complex in central Milan.