ICI London supports Like cobwebs or gold leaf. Exhibition of works by Italian artist Claudia Losi
Curated by Maria Hinel
Opening: Thursday 5th November, 6-8 PM with 7PM performance by the artist
Open until 5 December
Corner 7 Gallery, 7a Stratford Villas, London NW1 9SJ
Please write to maria@hinelart.com to RSVP for the opening night on 5 November
In Claudia Losi’s multimedia practice, nuanced images and stories of human and non-human figures become superimposed, intertwining and floating in the pictorial space. Giving rise to intricate, often mythic connections between beings, the works brought together in Like Cobwebs or Gold Leaf reflect the artist’s enduring enquiry into the origins and instability of distinctions between human and animal that have come to underpin the present social order. Bringing together new drawings, tapestries, and metal sculptures, the exhibition will also include the installation of Anìmule, hybrid images in torn paper made during Losi’s workshops with two local schools in Camden and the SIAL school in Holland Park.
. Titled Anìmule after a quotation from Emperor Hadrian’s verse, where it denotes the diminutive of anima, or a childlike, “little soul”, Losi’s ongoing series began with a simple act of tearing paper. Inviting workshop participants to imagine or recognise familiar forms in chance torn outlines, the artist subsequently animates the resulting silhouettes with light and shadow, interweaving numerous individual stories and associations. Gliding effortlessly along the surfaces of the darkened room, the shadows of Anìmule appear at once strikingly detailed and otherworldly, familiar and primeval. For Losi, there is a crucial association between these forms, rising and flickering in space, and Palaeolithic rock art. Emerging amid the gatherings of people, through an intuitive search for a shape with one’s hands – apophenia – half-animal, half-human beings continually shift and transform. They thus subvert not only our certainty in the modern taxonomies and hierarchies between species, but the very boundaries through which a figure comes to be recognised as human, animal, object or spirit. Extending this process into clay, Losi will create a group of ceramic Amulets in response to forms produced during the children’s workshops. Shaped by hand and initially left unfired, these ambiguous beings retain the immediacy of the torn-paper figures while opening them to another material state. Fired towards the end of the exhibition, the works emphasise the project’s evolving nature, tracing a continual passage between collective making, recognition and material transformation. The notion of thinking with one’s hands is also central to hand-embroidered jacquard tapestries from Losi’s series titled Oltre il Giardino (Beyond the Garden) on view in the exhibition. Emerging from a long-term participatory project in which hundreds of people were invited to describe and imagine a “natural place”, the tapestries fuse personal experience and scientific notions of nature, without resolving into a single point of view. Rather than presenting the individual as an autonomous subject, the works place it within an active web of relations, where memories, socio-cultural frameworks and natural forms continually shape and co-determine one another. In a new series of drawings made for Like Cobwebs or Gold Leaf, Losi draws on the logic of weaving patterns, superimposing Anìmule forms and conjuring fleeting dialogues between the figures in
space. Across the exhibition, collective acts of making thus become a mode of attending differently to humanity’s place in the natural order – one that resists fixed structures and allows enigmatic forms and connections to emerge, as if through an agency of their own, shaped by recognition, touch and relation.
Maria Hinel
The exhibition is open Friday and Saturday, 11 am – 6pm, or by appointment. To book an appointment please contact maria@hinelart.com
Workshops with children are made possible through the generous support of the Italian Cultural Institute in London
Claudia Losi was born in 1971 in Piacenza, where she lives and works. Among her recent solo exhibitions and performances are Kunstmeile Krems, 2026; La Strozzina/Lo Schermo dell’arte, Florence, 2025; Palazzo Te, Mantua, 2024; Obrera Centro e ICC, Mexico City; Arte in Fabbrica, Collezione Gori, Calenzano; Rocca Roveresca, Senigallia, 2022; MAMbo, Bologna, 2020; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2019; and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, 2016. She has also exhibited at MAXXI Museum, Rome; the Royal Academy, London; Marino Marini Museum, Florence; and Stenersen Museum, Oslo; Sharjah Biennial 8, United Arab Emirates, 2007. From 2004 to 2011, she developed the Balena Project: the mythical tale of a life-sized cloth whale that traveled the world, engaging people and imaginations wherever it went. Its story is told in the book The Whale Theory, Un Immaginario animale, Johann & Levi Editore, Monza 2021. The project Being There. Oltre il giardino is among the winners of the Italian Council – 9th Edition,
2020, supported by the MIC, and in 2022, a publication was released by Viaindustriae, Foligno, along with Tra le infinite combinazioni possibili, Gli Ori, Pistoia. In 2021, she published Voce a vento, Kunstverein Milano.
Maria Hinel is a Ukrainian-British independent curator and writer. Her curatorial work focuses on the intersections between art and philosophy, with a particular focus on human and nonhuman relations, language, identity and gender. Maria completed her BA in Art History and Philosophy from UCL, followed by an MA in Art History from the Courtauld, where she was a scholarship recipient. She was previously overseeing exhibitions at Skarstedt Gallery in London. Her recent projects include Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Hypha 1 Poultry, London), The Pleasure of Misuse (Royal Society of Sculptors, London, 2025); Carbon, Carbon Everywhere (Hypha HQ, London 2025), The Middle Voice (Shtager&Shch, London, 2024).
Corner7 is a project space founded by artist Rose Davey that delivers exhibitions, workshops, talks and provides temporary accommodation to artists visiting London. CORNER7 works in close collaboration with neighbouring Rochester Square Ceramic Studio.