​For the gallery’s third participation in Artissima, we are pleased to present a duo presentation of new works by New Hampshire-based American painter Danielle Fretwell (b. 1996) and London-based Italian sculptor Massimiliano Gottardi (b. 1989).

Aligned with the fair’s curatorial theme, Fancy: A Flexible, Acrobatic Body, both artists create works that ultimately reveal more than meets the eye, creating spaces where perception is continually unsettled and meaning is negotiated. Fretwell’s still-life paintings draw on the vanitas tradition, depicting fish and silverware as symbols of abundance and refinement as well as decay. Meticulously rendered yet partially obscured, these aspirational objects are staged as seductive but ultimately out of reach. Gottardi translates this vocabulary into sculpture, building with objects foreign to the language of classical architecture — glassware bound to celebration and ritual, left with its dregs.

Fretwell presents five new still-life oil paintings focusing on objects such as fish, knives and candles, which she thinks of as a continuation of one another — in her words, “one continuous dinner party”. They are in dialogue with Gottardi’s Palazzo della Memoria (Roman Rooms), a tower of glasses built from the repetition of a single element, the prosecco or champagne flute, which takes its title from the mnemonic technique of the memory palace: a vertical labyrinth where memory is lost rather than found.

By displacing household objects and stripping them of their primary functions, Gottardi imbues them with symbolic charge and speculative potential. Both artists reconfigure familiar things suspending them between utility and estrangement, and together the works address deception and unattainable pleasures. The booth becomes a space to reflect on collective desires and aspirations, inviting viewers to look beyond surface appearances.