On May 18, Saturday, the artists Marina Woisky (1996, São Paulo, Brazil) and Julia Gallo (1997, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) open the exhibition VRUMMM at Millan. With a critical essay by curator Pollyana Quintella, the show emphasizes the duo’s shared interest in creating ambiguous and hard-to-decipher images that allude to human and animal bodies.

VRUMMM features, side by side, a set of new works by Woisky and Gallo. While the artists employ different procedures and technique to create their pieces, they are united by the restless imagery permeating their work.

“Despite their specificities, they produce a strange visuality that threatens the limits between subject and object, animate and inanimate, interested in declassifying forms, confusing us, cheating categorizations”, Quintella explains.

This is Woisky’s second exhibition at the gallery. Here, the artist revisits earlier subjects of her research and turns to creating three-dimensional, self-supporting pieces. Drawing from an image archive —of her own or appropriated— of animal-shaped ornaments, hunting trophies and taxidermy models, Woisky restores the embodiment of these creatures by printing these images on fabrics and then sewing and filling them with concrete. And then, by coating them with resin, plush, or hair, which ultimately gives them a wet or soft appearance, opposite of that of their insides. In the pieces featured in the show, these animal’s movements, showing their fangs or biting themselves, as in Caçada [Hunting], or Leões Lutando [Fighting Lions], both 2024.

Motion and voraciousness also find their way into the work of Julia Gallo, who draws, paints and cuts out large pieces of paper as process to her work. Amidst the subdued colors tinting the surface in various shades, fragments of anatomy emerge. In doing so, the artist creates images that do not reveal themselves readily and seem to belong to other historical periods, and present unknown mythologies or a psychological body.

As stated by Pollyana Quintella, “in both productions, expressed through agonized mouths, twisted and sinuous volute-bodies, allergic to any linearity. Like beating wings captured in amber, they condense traces of movements that seem only temporarily frozen, they are the captured moment that immediately precedes or succeeds the gesture, as though they keep with them a certain disruptive potential, on the verge of a new awakening. Together, we remember that each form holds a species of life and that the images, far from passive, are always at the edge of convulsion.”

The convulsive motion of the images displayed by Gallo and Woisky is what inspires the exhibition’s title, suggesting a rapid, continuous movement whose end is not determined and whose meaning is not immediately understood.

About the artists

Marina Woisky holds a BFA from Unesp, São Paulo. In 2023, she presented the solo exhibition Water Stones and Creatures, at Millan, which was accompanied by a critical essay by Germano Dushá. Currently, she is developing a new project for the 38th Panorama de Arte Brasileira: 1000º at MAM, São Paulo, in addition to a solo show in Milan, Italy.

Julia Gallo holds a BFA from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado – FAAP, São Paulo, Gallo has participated in group shows such as Do desenho, at the Centro Cultural Correios, Rio de Janeiro, in 2024, More than Space, Fabrica, in Treviso, Italy, in 2022, Respirar sem oxigênio, at Millan, in 2017, among others. Her solo show Aguardente, at Paço das Artes, São Paulo, is set to take place next July.