Giovanna Biallo has worked in both painting and sculpture since the mid-1990s. The two seemingly different directions in her practice have been shaped by influences and experiences as far removed from one another as Mark Rothko and the abstract colour fields, and Russian avant-garde artists reimaging bourgeois porcelain collectables into revolutionary storytelling for the masses. Yet, both are the result of a slow and painstaking process: of sculpting the canvas (or, at times, paper or gesso board) through meticulous mixing and applications of gradations of colour, and of moulding, assembling, and painting her porcelain sculptures with layers of applied hues and repeated firing. The exhibition brings together abstraction and figuration, exploration of colour as language and the delight in figurative detail – and the exuberance that characterises both bodies of work.

My pieces always take a long time, explains the artist, both by choice and by necessity of porcelain making. Her paintings are equally absorbing, resulting in grids of endless colour variations exploring their potential to communicate with the viewer. In her sculpting process, she goes through several phases of hand modelling, cutting, carving, assembly and paint application for each piece. They require multiple firing sessions at temperatures as high 1300C between the different stages to achieve the richly coloured and robust form. The results are beguiling – the sculptures look like they belong to a different epoch, remnants of the world that is gone forever, shards of the past washed up on our shores, mythical protagonists of stories long forgotten. The artist interrupts our indulgence in nostalgia, however, sometimes adding a sprinkle of contemporary detail and sometimes, literally, planting the figurines into our contemporary world, referenced in their pedestals. It is this clash between the past, the comforting world of objects and the present defined through the intangible digital networks of words and images (“Subscribe”, “scrolling”, “Google”) that disrupts our perception. It creates a bit of welcome chaos in the world of magical porcelain brides and their shimmering veils, pitting them against rude (virtual) reality, while asking us to consider where they may belong. Or is this an invitation to consider where we belong in this brave new world?

This question takes us back to one of the formative influences in Biallo’s sculpting practice.  Coming across the book by Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky, Revolutionary Ceramics: Soviet porcelain 1917-1927, she was struck by how Russian avant-garde artists re-interpreted, re-appropriated and re-purposed the tradition of porcelain making, seen at the time as an attribute of bourgeois lifestyle and therefore belonging to the “dustbin of history”. Russian avant-garde largely embraced the revolution and answered the call to turn their art into the service of constructing the new world – they created designs for textiles, furniture, buildings and porcelain. Malevich, Popova, and Danko all contributed to the industrial revolutionary project. Some of their work introduced radical abstraction of form (famous tea sets and plates by Malevich), while others used the traditional and well-understood format of figurative porcelain to communicate and celebrate the new protagonists of history – soviet workers, revolutionary soldiers and everyday people making up the new ruling class, the proletariat. This reappropriation of the tradition was responsible for the survival and the thriving of porcelain production in post-revolutionary years – most soviet households had at least one of those figurines. Biallo found the story inspirational – she became interested in porcelain as a contemporary medium to communicate stories that interest her and to reflect on the world that we live in today.

Some of the sculptures, Cubic I and Cubic II, reference this lesser-known chapter of the medium’s history more directly, through the geometric forms, while their surfaces are filled with references from the artist’s personal life and other contemporary motifs. Others seem to connect more directly with Biallo’s painting practice, echoing the grid and flowing patterns of her paintings on some of their painted surfaces. Together they provide a kaleidoscopic glimpse into Biallo’s universe, where abstract and figurative, old and new, magical and literal exist side by side, and where, at times, it feels like the painted surface might slip off one of her sculptures, like a shawl off a bride’s shoulder, and melt onto the canvas’s surface.