For its 30th consecutive participation in Artissima, Galleria Raffaella Cortese presents a booth in dialogue with the 2025 theme, inspired by Richard Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Reflecting on collective responsibility, ecological awareness, and visionary thinking, the presentation brings together works by Gabrielle Goliath, Marcello Maloberti, Roni Horn, Yael Bartana, Francesco Arena, Monica Bonvicini, and Kimsooja.

Yael Bartana

Yael Bartana was born in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, in 1970. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Yael Bartana is an observer of the contemporary and a pre-enactor. She employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination, dissected group identities and (an-)aesthetic means of persuasion. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances and public monuments Yael Bartana investigates subjects like national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings.
Her work has been exhibited worldwide, and is represented in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

In 2023 she was awarded of the Rome Prize at German Academy in Rome Villa Massimo.
In 2024, she participated to the 60th Venice Biennale representing Germany.

Yael BartanaTrembling Times2017

Neon

177 × 250 cm

Yael BartanaScenes from Malka Germania (IV)2022

Color photograph, archival pigment print

56.2 × 81 cm; 57.7 × 82.1 × 4 cm framed

Anna Maria Maiolino

Anna Maria MaiolinoUntitled, série Incompletude (from the series Incompleteness)2019

Acrylic ink on paper

100 × 70 cm; 107 × 76,8 × 4 cm framed

Born in Scalea, Italy, 1942. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

Drawing from the everyday female consciousness and from an oppressive, censorial dictatorship – as experienced in 1970s and 1980s Brazil – Italian-born Anna Maria Maiolino has produced works steeped in vital force, in a wide range of languages and media throughout her artistic career: from performance to sculpture, from videos to photography, installation and drawing.

Maiolino was involved in Brazil’s 1960s New Figuration movement: her representational prints and drawings from these years were acts of resistance to the national military regime, rising urban inequalities, and culturally ingrained patriarchy. She would later cultivate an interest in spatial and existential issues with a shift towards Minimalism and Conceptualism, creating installations that coaxed interaction between viewer and object. Since 1989, Maiolino has started working with clay, crafting impermanent labor-intensive installations that foreground her physical handling of the material, references to the unconscious and recurrent gestures of everyday life.

Maiolino’s works are based on processes of creation necessarily paired with destruction, and almost constantly on matters of identity, from the subjective and universal point of view. Developing a dialogue between opposing and complementary categories, her artistic practice dissolves between dichotomies between the inside and the outside, between emptiness and matter, ancient and contemporary.

Maiolino was awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2024.
The artist has just concluded a major solo exhibition, “Je suis là. Estou aqui,” at the Musée National Picasso, Paris.

Anna Maria MaiolinoUntitled, from Licófitos series2020

Graphite on paper

70 × 100 cm; 82 × 112 × 4 cm framed

Anna Maria MaiolinoUntitled, from Licófitos series2020

Graphite on paper

70 x 100 cm

Francesco Arena

Francesco Arena was born in Mesagne, Brindisi, Italy in 1978. He lives and works in Cassano delle Murge, Bari, Italy.

If one tried to summarize a large part of Francesco Arena’s work into a formula, it would be as follows: numbers that take on form. From a linguistic point of view his work can be read as a development, a personal “derivation”, of sculptural processes that arise from the geometric shapes typical of Minimal art and from the more archetypal ones of Arte Povera. But from a thematic point of view his pieces are often the translation of formulae and numbers linked to private and personal facts.

Francesco ArenaLittle God (7)2024

Granite stones

26 × 17 × 25 cm

Francesco ArenaCube (The Naked Lunch)2024

Carrara marble, The Naked Lunch by William Burroghs

20,5 × 20,5 × 20,5 cm

Gabrielle Goliath

Gabrielle GoliathBearing I2024

Oil and chalk pastel on paper 

140 × 100 cm each

Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983) lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.

Goliath’s immersive, often evolving installations have been exhibited throughout South Africa and internationally. She has received numerous awards, including the Future Generation Art Prize - Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017).

Goliath has taken part to the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with the project Personal Accounts, which will be on show in Goliath's upcoming solo show at MoMA PS1.

Gabrielle GoliathBeloved (Suzanne)2024

Oil and chalk pastel on paper 

100 × 70 cm; 113 × 84 × 7 cm framed

Kimsooja

KimsoojaBottari2022

Used Bedsheets and Towels

50 × 45 × 45 cm

Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Taegu, Korea. She lives and works in New York, Paris and Seoul.

Combining performance, video, photo and installation, her work addresses issues of the displaced self and the other, while investigating the dualistic and existential nature of philosophy such as the relationship of yin and yang to life and death; mobility to immobility; and location to dislocation.

Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. In many pieces, everyday actions—such as sewing or doing laundry—become two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. Central to her work is the “bottari”, a traditional Korean bed cover used to wrap and protect personal belongings, which Kimsooja transforms into a philosophical metaphor for structure and connection.

KimsoojaDeductive Object – Rainbow Carpet 1998

Woven carpet

198,8 × 195 cm

Marcello Maloberti

Marcello Maloberti was born in 1966 in Codogno (Lodi), Italy. He lives and works in Milan.

Maloberti’s artistic research draws inspiration from trivial events and urban contexts, paying attention to shapeless and precarious states of life. His observations, however, go beyond the ordinary evidence of everyday life experience thanks to an often estranged and visionary neorealistic approach. His performances and multimedia installations take place in both private and public spaces having a strong interactive impact for the audience. The artist puts together an extremely condensed, theatrical narrative and suspenseful atmospheres for the viewer to watch and feel. The performers’ bodies belong to each other, they are part of a dialogue as they set up a participatory event. Maloberti also emphasizes the relationship between art and life researching new approaches to photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture and drawing, as to form a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk.
Maloberti has a current show at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan and Albisola and has just closed a major retrospective at PAC, Milan in 2025.

Marcello MalobertiDIO A BATTERIA2025

Neon, three truck batteries

225 × 180 cm circa

Marcello MalobertiDIO A BATTERIA 2025

Installation view, METRONOTTE, San Carlo Cremona, Bologna

Monica Bonvicini

Monica BonviciniWith One Leg2017

Pigment print on Tyvek and spray paint

183 × 136 × 3 cm

Born in Venice in 1965, Monica Bonvicini studied art in Berlin and at Cal Arts, Valencia, CA, USA. From 2003 to 2017 she was teaching Performative Arts and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In October 2017 she assumes the professorship for sculpture at the Uni- versität der Künste, Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.

Monica Bonvicini emerged as visual artist and started exhibiting internationally in the mid-1990s. Her multifaceted practice—which investigates the relationship between architecture, power and gender—is translated into works that question the meaning of making art, the ambiguity of language, the limits and possibilities attached to the ideal of freedom. Dry-humored, direct, and imbued with historical, political and social references, Bonvicini’s art never refrains from establishing a critical connection with the sites where it is exhibited, the materials that comprise it, and the roles of spectator and creator. This approach, which has been at the core of her production since her first solo exhibition at the California Institute of the Arts in 1991, has formally evolved over the years without betraying its analytical force and inclination to challenge the viewer’s perspective while taking hefty sideswipes at socio-cultural conventions.

Monica BonviciniWoodward, OK. 20122019

Tempera and spray paint on Fabriano paper

200 × 150 cm

Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas was born in 1936 in New York, where she lives and works.

Jonas is one of the most significant artists in the history of video and performance. Beginning in the 1960s, she placed female subjectivity at the center of her work, employing a complex linguistic repertoire including gestures, storytelling and images in movement.

A tireless experimenter, Jonas explores the possibilities inherent to the interdisciplinary nature of art, a characteristic that has made her a point of reference for a young generation of artists. Over time, she has established an intense relationship of exchange in collaborations with visual artists such as Peter Campus and Richard Serra, the performer Ragani Haas and musicians Alvin Curran and Jason Moran. The continuous renewal and transpositions of the media Jonas experiments with sources from fairy tales to essays, from myths to local folklore and relate newly to contemporary life, both poetically and politically.

In 2015 Jonas represented the United States at the 56th Venice Biennale. She has taken part in Documenta V, VI, VII, VIII, XI, XIII in Kassel, Germany. In 2018 the artist received the prestigious Kyoto Prize and in 2009 she obtained the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s first Lifetime Achievement Award.

Joan JonasUntitled from Reanimation performance2014

Ink on paper

74,5 × 105 cm; 82 × 112 × 4 cm framed

Joan JonasStreet Scene with Chalk1976/2008/2010 [with Viewing box, 2021]

Video, color, sound (11' 04" loop) with painted MDF structure, wood trestles, painted MDF bench

165 × 150 × 109 cm overall dimensions of Viewing box and trestles
48 x 120 x 40 bench

Roni Horn

Roni Horn was born in 1955 New York. She lives and works in New York City.

Horn’s artistic production, which spans for about fifty years now, explores the changing nature of art through sculpture, works on paper, photography and books. Roni’s drawings focus on the materiality
of the objects depicted, using also the written word at the basis of his drawings and other works. Horn creates complex relationships between the observer and her works, for example by placing a single piece on opposite walls, in communicating rooms or across a series of different spaces and buildings. Horn subverts the notion of “identical experience” by insisting that self-perception is determined by place in the “here-and-there” and by a time in the “now-and-then”. Her works also combine the critical relationship between mankind and nature; a relationship similar to a mirror, in which we try to shape nature according to our image. Over the past fourty years, Roni Horn’s work has been intimately linked to particular photographs, the geology, climate and culture of Iceland.

Roni HornNext 52004

Yellow-green pigments on paper with varnish

50,8 × 66,04 cm

Roni HornBy Elizabeth Taylor 2 • Blank with Hole2022
Tom Powel

Two pigment prints on rag paper. Bleed images, floated edge-to-edge in frame

34,8 × 53,8 cm; 40 × 59,3 × 3 cm framed

Roni HornEmpire at Night • By Elizabeth Taylor 12022

Two pigment prints on rag paper, framed together

34,8 × 53,8 cm; 40 × 59,3 × 3 cm framed