Artist Ad Minoliti Imagines the Feminist Future of Space Exploration

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The work of Ad Minoliti is a digital fever dream. In the Buenos Aires-based artist’s paintings, prints and installations, forms resembling the early modernist iconography of Henri Matisse, Maruja Mallo and Joaquin Torres-Garcia appear in bright RGB hues, overlaid on TV cartoons, architectural photographs and internet memes. Art history appears in clashing collages: the humanoid figures in Metafisica Sexy (2015), for instance, riff on El Lissitzky, though they frolic in a landscape of molten foliage. Minoliti has used Photoshop to transpose these pastiche arrangements into the living rooms of Case Study Houses; other installations employ wallpaper and furniture to envision these environments at human scale.

‘The Feminist School of Painting,’ Minoliti’s 2018 exhibition at Kadist, San Francisco, playfully reimagined the art historical narratives of painting – landscape, portraiture, still life – as filtered through a web browser logged to science and technology blogs, biology data centres, industrial design portfolios and texts on gender theory. Geometries in space (2019), her special commission for frieze, furthers this interest in gender and science by envisioning space exploration free of male chauvinism. Minoliti was inspired, in part, by 2017 reports that suggested future NASA missions to Mars be entirely female, in order to avoid sexual harassment and clashing egos. Patriarchy flies in tandem with colonialism: ‘Landscape as a pictorial genre was used to promote the colonial invasion of America,’ says the artist, ‘and recent movies about Mars exploration exhibit many of the same structures.’ Geometries in space imagines colonies of the future informed by techno-feminism as a possible corrective to our cruel world.

-Evan Moffitt

• Read the rest of our Buenos Aires City Report here.