Elsabé Milandri / Studio reunion
We’ve had the wonderful Elsabé Milandri back in the studio, working on two new screen print collaborations that have come out beautifully and are ready to fly off the drying racks and into your homes.
This studio session was something like a reunion, as Milandri was one of the first artists we worked with back in 2016 – on “Tiger A”, a magnificent monochrome screen print that sold out fast. Her second artwork with us, “Pivot” (2020), was also a sell-out success. (Needless to say, her work sells swiftly, so consider yourselves politely warned.)
It’s always a joy being involved in Milandri’s creative process. She makes drawings in our studio, in intensive, intuitive and explorative sessions that lead to developing conversations – between the artist and her work, between all of us in the studio, and between the various drawing mediums and the screen printing discipline. It’s an engrossing push and pull of gesture and containment, a discovering of new territory that results in work with an unrivalled sense of immediacy.
50ty/50ty original print / “Double senses”
“Double senses” was born directly from the intensive activity in the studio: the gestural drawing sessions, the conversations, the image selection, the playing with colour and screen print techniques. This original print is available as a 50ty/50ty edition of 25.
Milandri describes this work in her inimitable way:
“A quick-motion brush and ink drawing of my Mika.
She’s a link to the under-world / the sensory world / the world of greater instinct.
She is soft to the touch.
The intuition / also the sense of humour / the specific stretch, turn and tilt of the head to look, listen, smell.
(This is a painting of all of the above.)
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Meet-in-the-making original print / “The embrace”
We fell in love with one of Milandri’s life drawings at her Open Studio sale, and we knew it would make a beautiful screen print edition for our Meet-in-the-making range, our series that’s inspired by artists’ sketchbooks – conceived to invite intimate engagement with an artist’s creative process.
In Milandri’s words:
“‘The embrace’ is based on a willow stick charcoal drawing on newsprint – a light, quick drawing of one of the most salient points of lived experience.”
She aptly describes the experience of life drawing as “all the mis-looking and re-looking, the feeling of shape and negative space, the gravity and lightness of limb and stretch, the process of it all.”
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About Elsabé Milandri
Elsabé Milandri (b.1980) works with ideas in the flow between the everyday and the profound, her work marked by a sense of immediacy in both subject and process. Her references speak of personal proximity – in her space and experience – drawn from motherhood, ritual and weather conditions; exploring ways of knowing, natural history and free association. In an intuitive creative process she describes as “searching out the sublime and [the] synapses between ideas, the exchanges between what is observed and what is felt”, observational drawing serves as a catalyst for playful improvisation and gestural response, the physical movement of mark-making engaging with the emotive.
To date, Milandri has had a number of solo shows in South Africa and one in Switzerland, her most recent solo held at Everard Read/Circa. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions and has work held in private collections in the UK, in the USA and throughout Europe.
