DIALOGHI CANOVIANI
Karen LaMonte.
Nocturnes
23 October 2025 – February 2026
First floor, Canova rooms
Curated by
Chiara Squarcina
Eraldo Mauro
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Karen LaMonte has the extraordinary ability to investigate the human figure by subtraction. Through an analytical work, initially focused on the container-garment, the artist manually retraces, with obsessive and scientific precision, every single fold, modifying each yarn in its smallest detail.
It is the evocation of a female world that the artist places before us: the fusion in glass crystallizes this creative process to deliver it in a transparency that now appears suspended in time, motionless yet richly evocative and pervaded by distant echoes.
In her recent series of works entitled Nocturnes, the artist again raises the bar by guiding us on a journey through nocturnal visions populated with sculptures now immersed in an atmosphere marked by different shades of blue, just as the veils of colour differ as evening glides towards night: tone on tone.
The artist’s work is not extraneous to classical art and Canova’s Neoclassicism. But while in Canova perfection of execution serves to bring inert matter to life, in Karen LaMonte the same perfection serves rather to evoke a possible form of life, to create the conditions from which that life can emerge. This is a comparison between two visions of art that are apparently similar yet actually opposed, and could be summed up in the relation between description and deduction.
A glance in the mirror. In Karen LaMonte’s sculptures it is not the female body in its glowing fullness that dominates the scene, but, as in a photographic negative, its absence. A nocturnal breeze swirls lightly over the surfaces of these new works of hers, slipping between their folds, seeming to reshape their outlines: the transparency of the glass tinged in the night slowly leads us beyond the usual, beyond the apparent, until the slow emergence of the unexpected.
Admission to the exhibition from 23 October 2025 to February 2026, with the Museum’s hours and tickets.