Münster

Münster, 2016, installation view Galleria Valentina Bonomo, Rome

Galleria Valentina Bonomo inaugurates the 2016 Fall Season with Münster, the solo exhibition of paintings by Caterina Silva. The title of the exhibition is a reference to a specific event in history - the Münster Rebellion in Westphalia. In the winter of 1534 a group of Anabaptists seized the town of Münster, confiscating all private property to be held as common and legalizing polygamy. A year and a half after the upheaval, the leaders of the movement were executed, bringing the Anabaptist rule to an abrupt end. This episode is a metaphor of the Utopian dream of a society free of sovereigns and based on the principle of equality. Caterina Silva sees her artistic practice as a struggle with language and its classification’s systems. She uses painting to probe at the obscure spaces of her mind, that which is impossible to explain in words but which exists and materializes into matter and then object. These open-ended images lend themselves to the interpretation of the observer; they are the consequence of a process of deconstruction of the artist’s own internal superstructure. For Silva, the choice of colour, canvas size, and material arises from her relationship with the body as a space liberated from the functional, organizational nature of language.