Natural Satellite Series

In 2018, Minoliti established the “Feminist School of Painting” for an exhibition at Kadist in San Francisco as a strategy to review the patriarchal construction of art history and offer a contemporary critique. The project continues to function as an analysis of cultural fields through feminist, queer and de-colonial theory. For Minoliti, an image carries intention and its roots in cultural biases remain overlooked. Through painting and lectures, she finds the discriminatory elements of our society that reproduce themselves through our gaze in painting and proposes solutions to reduce them. The history of art becomes exposed as a legacy of white patriarchal society and artificial dualism.

In the Natural Satellite Series (2020), landscapes and characters are abstracted into avatars formed by mathematical shapes that recall modernist avant-gardes. The subject’s lack of form creates a utopian state of radical equality in which our notions of racism, sexism and homophobia finally disappear. This series is painted over appropriated images taken from the archives of imaginary space stations, utopias and proposals for space colonisation; landscape is deconstructed in its emotional and manipulative guise. Considering that landscape paintings were used in the past to promote the colonisation of the Americas and what were depicted as pristine and untouched forests, Minoliti critiques these popular images of human habitation in outer space. Minoliti’s abstract characters exist in front of the same human landscapes that have been the background for centuries of exploitation.