Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea presents The face of all your fears, a solo show of the Sweden artist Anneè Olofsson.

With an iconography that carnally and directly comments on the tension between detachedness and affinity, time and aging, the artist works primarily with analog photography and video, occasionally even sculpture. Olofsson returns repeatedly to her own body as an unrestricted artistic tool. Her parents and near family have had important roles in her stagecraft as well. Bodies become symbols which tell not only of our inscrutability, but of our human limitations as well. In Anneè Olofsson’s space, persons are tightly bound within a compact blackness, and the human presence therein has the power to instill as much life as death into spatiality.

The exhibition The face of all your fears circles around the questions which most interest Anneè Olofsson. In these rather autobiographical pieces – and as suggested by its title – she challenges her own obsessions, fears and traumas. In the photos Childwold, Re Mains, Naked Light of Day and Hide and Seek the artist has focuses her attention on childhood and growing up, aging and death, loss and memory, expressing our fear of becoming old and our chase of constant youth.

The artist is interested in how we decode images and how the gaze changes over time. She delves through different layers of meaning, dissects and investigates, trying to find new questions and answers.

The video A Demons Desire and the photoseries with the same title (photos taken during the filming) is based on the legendary and controversial cover image on the album Virgin Killer (1976) of the German heavy metal group “The Scorpions”. The cover shows a young naked girl and it has incited strong reactions ever since the record was released over 30 years ago: the album was banned, a new cover had to be made and in some countries they even put a black plastic cover on top of the album to hide the girl. Interested and fascinated by this story the artist started the research on the people involved, finally finding, after two years, Michael Von Gimbut, the photographer.

In the video Anneé Olofsson has made a sort of reconstruction of her fantasies about how the photograph might have been done. Behind the camera we see Michael von Gimbut, assisted by his wife Parvin, just as in 1976. He was the only man present at the session: in addition to the girl’s mother and sister, the PR people, stylists and representatives of the record company were all women. The identity of this girl, as promised, has never been revealed; on the net her name has been discussed for years and there is a thought that her name might be Jaquline. Therefore the title of the sculpture The shadow of Jaquline, which represent in three dimensions the girl, seen with the eyes of the artist, painted in black, like a shadow.

Galleria Mimmo Scognamiglio
Via Privata Giovanni Ventura, 6
Milan 20134 Italy
(Entrance from Via privata Massimiano, 27)
Tel. +39 02 36526809
Fax. +39 02 36595527
info@mimmoscognamiglio.com
www.mimmoscognamiglio.com

Opening hours
From Tuesday to Saturday
From 3.00 pm to 7.00 pm