Raffaella Cortese is proud to present, in her spaces at Via Stradella 1 and 7, the solo show by American artist Helen Mirra.

Mirra’s pensive installations are formally minimal and made with humble materials, such as wool blankets, raw linen, hand-dyed cotton banding. For the artist, walking is an integral component to all her works. Since 2010, she has been organizing these walks with great attention and precision, as sort of open-ended expeditions in different places of the world. The results take various forms – sometimes printmaking, sometimes writing, sometimes sound recordings. Artists such as Anni Albers, André Cadere, John Cage, Douglas Huebler, and Ree Morton share her orbit. Mirra’s habitat is an edge – where logic and geology meet, according to the weather.

On show in via Stradella 1, the Hourly Field Notes series from Western Japan, realised during autumn 2012.

Each of these works is made with brief texts written through the course of a single day’s walking, and each hour is represented by a one meter length of 16mm wide cotton – a slice of the landscape, a partial horizon, a short silent-silent film.

On show in via Stradella 7, Mirra’s most recent Hourly Directional Field Notations realised in Arizona in 2012. These are made over the course of a walking day as a sort of paced printmaking. The activities are interdependent: the walking structures the printing, and the printing impels the walking. The prints were made with watercolor on raw linen, and the size is that of a drop cloth or ground cloth, which when folded, fits in Mirra’s backpack. The prints are direct impressions of paradigmatic materials found en route: neither photographic nor descriptive, their geographic location indeterminate, they are nonetheless an insistent sort of fact.

Both series of works develop from Mirra's present practice: a cycle of exhibitions in which walking in one region results in a body of work for exhibition and subsequent walking in another. Next Mirra will walk in the Dolomites.

Helen Mirra (Rochester New York 1970) lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has had solo shows at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Recent group shows include the 50th Sao Paulo Biennial and exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Nasjonalmuseet Oslo, Maramotti Collection, and Kunsthaus Graz. Mirra has been a guest of the DAAD Kuenstlerprogramm (Berlin), Office of Contemporary Art Norway (Oslo), Stiftung Laurenz Haus (Basel), and Iaspis (Stockholm).

Galleria Raffaella Cortese
Via Stradella, 7
Via Stradella, 1
Milan 20129 Italy
Ph. +39 02 2043555
info@galleriaraffaellacortese.com
www.galleriaraffaellacortese.com

Opening hours
Tuesday – Saturday
10am - 1pm and 3pm - 7.30pm and by appointment

Related images: Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano