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• IL CORPO DELL’ANIMA. Martin Soto Climent, Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind, Carlo Bugatti •15 /04 - 27/06

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Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind | Martin Soto Climent Il corpo dell’anima

Two artists born nearly a century apart, and yet, placed together, their work speaks the same language.

Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind and Martín Soto Climent share an obsession that transcends time: the fold. In Herta’s klecksography, the fold of the paper is the generative act, the point of pressure, contact, and reversal from which the entire image unfolds. In Martín’s leather and textile pieces, the fold is the work itself: a minimal torsion of matter that alludes, as Sofia Silva writes, “to the organ, the anatomical cavity, and the celestial vault.” Both artists insist that surfaces are never merely surfaces.

For Herta, cloth becomes the sensory manifestation of an invisible order. For Martín, it becomes what remains once the image has withdrawn — a stubborn, sensual persistence of material that once held the body close. Their dialogue is the exhibition’s quiet revelation: that certain formal and emotional intuitions outlast their historical moment, and find each other across time.

#IlCorpoDellAnima #MartinSotoCliment #HertaOttolenghiWedekind #ERAGallery by @_eragallery

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a month ago

Before it became Casa Ortelli, it had been the home of artists since 1870.

ERA Gallery is located at Via Gioacchino Rossini 3, within a historic building constructed between 1871 and 1887, designed by Innocenzo Odescalchi and Pietro Ortelli. Conceived from the outset to house artists’ studios and ateliers, it remains one of the few buildings in Milan whose identity has been intrinsically linked to artistic production since its foundation.

A remarkable example of late nineteenth-century Eclecticism, the palazzo features a Romantic-style courtyard with monolithic Candoglia marble columns—the same marble used for Milan’s Duomo—alongside elegant arches and richly decorated architectural details.

From its earliest years, the building became a meeting place for artists, collectors, and patrons, earning the name Casa degli Artisti. Under the vision of engineer Adolfo Premoli Silva, the ateliers welcomed some of the most important figures of modern Italian art, including Roberto Crippa, Medardo Rosso, Lucio Fontana, and Regina Cassolo Bracchi, as well as architects such as Marcello Nizzoli, Alessandro Mendini, and Mario Oliveri.

The space now occupied by ERA Gallery was once home to the Circolo di Via Rossini 3, a cultural gathering place for artists, intellectuals, and collectors. The building also housed the Milan branch of the gallery founded by Alexander Iolas, the visionary dealer who helped bring artists such as René Magritte and Jean Tinguely to international prominence.

ERA Gallery chose this location for its extraordinary artistic legacy. Its name, ERA, reflects a dialogue between memory and innovation—a place where history and contemporary vision continue to meet.

📸 Photos:
* Courtesy of the Premoli Silva Family Archive
* Ph. 2: Gli archeologi (1968) by Giorgio de Chirico. * Ph. 3: 1966 poster by Jean Tinguely by @_eragallery

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Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind | Martin Soto Climent Il corpo dell’anima | On view until June 27.

Martín Soto Climent’s objects do not dominate a room. They negotiate with it.

Working across installation, sculpture, and found material, the Mexico City-born artist has always been drawn to objects whose logic is precarious, things that balance, hang, tilt, lean, or spread in arrangements that feel perpetually on the edge of change. In Il Corpo dell’Anima, his works enter into genuine dialogue with one of Milan’s most historically charged interiors: a building that has hosted artists, dealers, and collectors for over 150 years.

There is something fitting about the encounter. Soto Climent works with the residual, textile scraps, pantyhose, leather, and materials that carry what Sofia Silva calls “the stubborn persistence of material once the image has withdrawn.” Within these walls, that logic resonates with the building’s own accumulation of history: layer upon layer of artistic exchange, held in check by stone and mortar.

His work does not compete with the space. It listens to it.

#MartinSotoCliment #ERAGallery #InstallationArt #ContemporaryArt #MexicanArt by @_eragallery

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a month ago

Martin Soto Climent on view at Era Gallery until June 27

Martín Soto Climent’s leather pieces in the Caramel series are, in one sense, among the most restrained works in Il Corpo dell’Anima: small in scale, monochromatic, still. And yet they radiate a charged physicality that larger works rarely achieve. The leather is coloured in a deep wine-red that holds both warmth and shadow, and folded with the precision of a single, definitive gesture. A narrow line runs down the center: the trace of the fold, the mark of contact, the place where two sides of the same surface once pressed together.

Soto Climent has described the fold as a figure of “an interior that resists full visibility.” Each piece in this series enacts that resistance: closed without being sealed, quiet without
being absent.

— Caramel series
Lovely Kounellis
2026
31 × 25 cm
Colored leather

#MartinSotoCliment #ERAGallery#ContemporaryArt #MilanoArte by @_eragallery

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a month ago

Martin Soto Climent on view at Era Gallery until June 27

There is a strange intimacy to objects that have touched the body.

In the Gossip series, Martín Soto Climent encases dyed pantyhose, unique, irreproducible, behind plexiglass, set within a walnut box. The result is something between a reliquary and a specimen case: a container that preserves its contents with the solemnity of something precious, while the contents themselves retain the improbable ordinariness of an everyday garment.

Pantyhose carries the form of the body that last wore them, ghost-thin, skin-adjacent, intimate beyond intention. By dyeing them and fixing them under glass, Soto Climent transforms this residual object into what Sofia Silva calls “the sensitive support of indirect persistence.” The body is not present. But the impression of its presence is. As she writes: “The body is that which has left a place behind.”

Gossip (the silence at the heart of the caress)
Dyed pantyhose (unique) and plexiglass,
mounted in a walnut box
31.5 × 21.5 × 10 cm

#MartinSotoCliment #ERAGallery #ContemporaryArt #MilanoArte by @_eragallery

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a month ago

Martín Soto Climènt on view at Era Gallery until June 27

The fold holds what the eye cannot see.
In Wild Dandy Martín Soto Climènt presents a surface that is, in every technical sense, simple: dyed leather, formed into a pleat, mounted against the wall. And yet what the work gives back is anything but simple. The deep navy field, the color of late evening, of something withheld, folds along a central axis and opens, very slightly, as if the material itself is breathing.

Soto Climènt has spoken of the fold as a primary formal event: “the comma,” the pause within a sentence, the place where meaning accumulates before continuing. In the Caramel series, each piece bears a title that evokes intimacy, sensation, and the textures of a specific emotional register. These are not abstract objects. They are moods given material form: quiet, insistent, entirely precise.

Caramel Series
Wild Dandy
2026
41,5 × 32 cm
#contemporaryart #mexicanartist #eragallery by @_eragallery

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a month ago

HERTA OTTOLENGHI WEDEKIND | Il corpo dell’anima | On view until June 27.

Before Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind ever touched a loom, she worked with her hands in a different way entirely.

Between 1910 and 1912, she traveled to Rome to train as a sculptor under the German artist Hans Stoltenberg Lerche, a ceramist and sculptor of considerable reputation whose studio on Via Flaminia attracted some of the most ambitious young artists of the period. It was here that Herta developed her instinct for three-dimensionality: for how form occupies space, how weight settles, and how a body’s surface holds light.

This sensibility never left her. When, in the early 1920s, she moved decisively toward textiles, the understanding she had built in Rome traveled with her. Her woven and embroidered works carry a sculptor’s awareness of volume and relief. The thread is not flat; it presses, accumulates, recedes. The surface is not passive; it breathes.

In this shift lies a remarkable artist: a woman trained in one of the most traditional art forms who quietly reinvented herself and, in doing so, expanded the possibilities of another.

📸Photos extracted from the book HERTA OTTOLENGHI WEDEKIND, by Berardi - Gomiero.

Ph.1 Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind,
Nudo femminile Gesso Ubicazione sconosciuta
—
Ph. 2 Modella del nudo femminile nel cortile dello studio dello scultore Adolf Bermann 1912, Monaco
—
Ph. 3 La piscina con il Tobiolo di Arturo Martini e la Bagnante di Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind

#HertaOttolenghiWedekind #WomenSculptors #ArtHistory #ItalianArt#contemporaryart by @_eragallery

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a month ago

Il Corpo dell’Anima | ERA Gallery | Until June 27.

At some point in the early 1920s, the thread became the material of thought.

Having trained as a sculptor, Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind brought to the textile medium a radical set of demands: that cloth could occupy space, that pattern could carry structure, that weaving could be as conceptually rigorous as any work made in stone or bronze. Her transition was not a retreat into craft; it was a strategic expansion of what art could be made from.

The large-scale textile works she developed in this period do not ask to be hung and admired from a distance. They spill, they mass, they claim the floor.

What she understood, and what these works make visible, is that the body of cloth is never neutral. It has memory. It holds the mark of the hand that made it, and the form it once covered.
—
Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind
Ricamo
1920
206 x 238 cm

#HertaOttolenghiWedekind #WomenInArt #ItalianArt #TextileSculpture #ERAGallery by @_eragallery

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“Exposition internationale des Arts Décoratifs - Paris - Grand Palais - 3 Juin 1925”

Before abstraction had a name, Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind was already practicing it.

In 1922, she patented a method unlike anything the decorative arts had seen: a procedure of symmetrical duplication rooted in chance. By pressing random ink marks across a folded sheet of paper, an act not unlike the Rorschach blots being developed simultaneously in psychodiagnostics, she generated an inexhaustible vocabulary of forms that no human imagination, working alone, could have invented. Motifs emerged from the unconscious logic of accident: mirrored, dense, alive.

This was not an ornament. This was a system. Applied to tapestries, carpets, embroideries, screens, and furniture coverings, Herta’s klecksography anticipated the gestural freedoms of Abstract Expressionism and drew parallels with the Surrealist movement decades before these movements took institutional form. Her works were celebrated at exhibitions in Munich, Paris, Berlin, Monza, and Milan, and were acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

To rediscover Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind today is to understand that the avant-garde did not belong only to those who named it. Some of its most radical acts were woven in thread.

— On view in Il Corpo dell’Anima, with a text by Sofia Silva, until June 27.

📸Photos extracted from the book HERTA OTTOLENGHI WEDEKIND, by Berardi - Gomiero.
——
Ph. 1
Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind tra le sue creazioni
1925
“Exposition internationale des art dècoratifs et industriel modernes, Parigi, Grand Palais”
——
Ph. 2
Sala di Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind
1925
“Exposition internationale des art dècoratifs et industriel modernes, Parigi, Grand Palais”
——
Ph.3
Sala di Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind
1925
“Exposition internationale des art dècoratifs et industriel modernes, Parigi, Grand Palais”

#HertaOttolenghiWedekind #Klecksography #TextileArt #ModernArt #womeninarthistory by @_eragallery

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a month ago

Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind on view in Il Corpo dell’Anima, with a text by Sofia Silva, until June 27

At first glance, Ricamo feels remarkably contemporary. Its vertical composition, rhythmic symmetry, and vibrant palette speak a visual language that remains strikingly relevant today.

For Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind, textiles were never a secondary medium but a sophisticated artistic practice capable of uniting color, architecture, and space. Through repeated motifs, carefully balanced chromatic relationships, and a refined embroidery technique, she transformed textile making into a form of abstraction long before it became central to modern artistic discourse.

As Sofia Silva notes, the textiles of Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind constitute the sensory manifestation of an invisible order. From the 1920s onward, she developed her visual language through the technique of klecksography and later translated these investigations into embroidery, fabrics, tapestries, carpets, screens, and seat coverings. The symmetrical forms that emerge throughout her work are generated through processes of duplication, folding, pressure, contact, and reversal, transforming decorative surfaces into highly structured compositions.

What makes Ricamo particularly compelling is its use of color—not as decoration, but as structure. Deep blues, vivid reds, and luminous yellows create a dynamic rhythm across the surface, giving the work a sense of movement and architectural presence. The precision of the stitched forms, their repetition and variation, reveal Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind’s ability to construct visual harmony through thread, texture, and pattern.

Created within the cultural vision of Villa Ottolenghi, this work reflects Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind’s belief that art should extend beyond the canvas and become part of lived experience. Nearly a century later, its formal clarity, material intelligence, and modern sensibility continue to resonate.
—
Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind Ricamo 1920 Embroidery 335 × 136 cm

#HertaOttolenghiWedekind #TextileArt #WomenInArtHistory #VillaOttolenghi #ArtHistory by @_eragallery

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2 months ago

Herta Ottolenghi on view in “IL CORPO DELL’ANIMA” with a text by Sofia Silva, until June 27.

Born in Berlin in 1885, Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind was an artist, patron, collector, and one of the most visionary female cultural figures of the early twentieth century. Her artistic journey was shaped by the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art”, a philosophy that sought to transform every aspect of life through beauty, creativity, and culture.

Deeply rooted in this vision, Herta believed in art as an expression of the human spirit, capable of capturing life’s essence and elevating the soul. At a time when women were rarely recognized within the cultural sphere, she forged her own path, bringing together art, architecture, design, and craftsmanship in a uniquely modern and forward-thinking practice.

Together with Arturo Ottolenghi, she transformed Villa Ottolenghi into an extraordinary artistic project known as “The Dream of Eternity”, collaborating with some of the most important artists of her time, including Arturo Martini, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, and architect Marcello Piacentini. The result was a lasting legacy of artistic and cultural identity that continues to inspire today.

Through her work—ranging from sculpture to tapestry- Herta contributed to the reconstruction of Italy’s cultural landscape and secured her place among the most remarkable women in European cultural history. Her innovative vision and modern sensibility remain strikingly relevant today.

📸Photos by the book Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind by Berardi-Gomiero
#HertaOttolenghiWedekind #WomenInArt #ArtHistory #FemaleVisionaries #WomenWhoInspire by @_eragallery

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2 months ago

IL CORPO DELL'ANIMA | Martin Soto Climent, Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind, Carlo Bugatti group exhibition now on view at ERA GALLERY Via G. Rossini n.3. .... In The Body of the Soul, the body appears through margins—sensitive supports of its indirect persistence—edges, casts: a theatre of substitutions.
The body is that which has left a place.
Within this horizon can also be situated the textiles of Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind (Berlin, 1885 – Acqui, 1953), in which form becomes the sensible manifestation of an invisible order. Beginning in the 1920s, through the process of klecksography and later in its translations into embroidery, fabrics, tapestries, carpets, screens, and seating, Ottolenghi Wedekind develops symmetrical images generated by the folding of a sheet. The fold returns in the form of duplication, pressure, contact, and reversal..." text by Sofia Silva by @_eragallery

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3 months ago