Shoshana Walfish. Vischioso: curated by Domenico de Chirico
29 May - 5 July 2025 Milano
Shoshana Walfish. Vischioso, curated by Domenico de Chirico

ABC-ARTE is pleased to present Vischioso, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Canadian painter Shoshana Walfish, who lives and works between Brussels and Montreal.

 

The title evokes an ambiguous and fertile condition: something thick enough to capture and absorb its surroundings, yet fluid enough to move, transform, and shift. The works on view move along this porous threshold between definition and dissolution, body and environment, figuration and abstraction.

 

Walfish’s painting is an intuitive and deeply embodied practice that explores, through a queer-feminist lens, the limits and possibilities of bodily experience. Her compositions often begin with a recognizable figure, which is then absorbed into the background—dissolved into a visceral landscape of folds, flesh, membranes, and painterly matter. Hands, fragments of skin, hints of human form emerge and vanish in a constant osmosis between subject and environment.

 

Vischioso will be on view from May 29 to July 5 at our Milanese venue, ABC-ARTE ONE OF, located at Via Santa Croce 21, Milan. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, May 29, from 6:30 PM.

 

With visual references ranging from Goya to Alina Szapocznikow, Walfish also reworks iconographies from religious painting—such as the Pietà or Saint Lucy—not to reaffirm their symbolic value, but to subvert their historical use as tools of social control and normativity. The body, in its viscosity and vulnerability, becomes a site of resistance, mystery, and desire.

 

Vischioso invites a sensory and layered contemplation in which the painted image becomes flesh and living surface. These works inhabit the space as mobile and ambiguous presences, oscillating between what can be named and what remains elusive. In them, painting becomes not just representation but experience—a pulsating material reminding us of the complexity of inhabiting both a body and a space. 

Download Press Release
Back to the exhibition