Isabella Costabile. Whose is this?
Curated by Chiara Nuzzi and Gabriella Rebello Kolandra

The project room of Fondazione ICA Milano hosts Whose is This?, an exhibition project by Isabella Costabile (New York, 1991), curated by Chiara Nuzzi and Gabriella Rebello Kolandra. The exhibition is part of the autumn program’s triptych, alongside solo shows by Oliver Osborne (first floor) and Lewis Hammond (ground floor), on view from September 26 to November 8, 2025.

Costabile’s artistic practice lies at the intersection of sculpture and installation, developing through assemblage to construct new landscapes and imaginaries. The exhibition features five works, including four new productions, made with recovered materials—mainly metal scraps sourced from industrial plants, garages, streets, or dumpsters—which the artist reassembles without altering their original appearance, simply recontextualizing their function.

“What once had a functional purpose and reflected personal and cultural ways of living now becomes a tool for another language, one that questions the conventional notions of reality and ownership,” explains Costabile.

The dialogue with the exhibition space is a central element of the creative process: the former 1930s industrial building, now home to the Foundation, is itself the result of a process of subtraction and reduction to a primary essentiality, which served as a source of inspiration for the artist.

The exhibited works—assemblages of iron parts welded at points of geometric convergence—present themselves as hybrid, unstable, and potentially transformative presences. Among them, Intreccio quotidiano marks a new phase in Costabile’s research, in which she explores drawing and the shadows cast by the sculptures, considered as integral parts of the composition and generators of shifting visual patterns.

Curators Chiara Nuzzi and Gabriella Rebello Kolandra note: “Like relics of a material world produced by humans, Isabella Costabile’s sculptures compose a landscape—an archaeology of memory—where objects carry the weight of time and become, in the exhibition, devices capable of narrating it through images. They register, in the physicality of matter, a process of transformation.”

A constant element in the artist’s practice is the written word. The titles of the works guide the viewer’s gaze and activate new imaginaries, as seen in Dreaming on books, which recalls the form of a school desk and introduces the idea of transparency as a metaphor for dreaming.
The audience is invited to recognize a part of themselves in objects that have lost their original function and acquired new meaning. The works thus free themselves from the logic of ownership, opening up to a relational dimension that echoes the Duchampian legacy of the ready-made and objet trouvé.

Fondazione ICA Milano thanks Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, official sponsor of the Foundation, and Valsoia for supporting ICA Milano’s programming and activities.

The exhibition Isabella Costabile. Whose is This? is made possible with the support of Eni as Main Partner and the gallery le vite, Milan.

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ICA Milano thanks Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, official sponsor of the Foundation and Valsoia for supporting ICA Milano’s program and activities.

The exhibitions Isabella Costabile. Whose is this? is made possible with the support of Eni as Main Partner.

Special thanks to le vite gallery for supporting Isabella Costabile. Whose is this?

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ISABELLA COSTABILE
Born in 1991 in New York, Isabella Costabile lives and works between Milan and Grosseto. She grew up between Jamaica, the United States, and Italy. She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. Her sculptural practice is rooted in a compositional methodology based on the interpretation of found materials and objects, reflecting on the ambiguity of forms and the multiple perceptions of reality. Her work has been presented in various institutions including Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno (2022); Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene (2023); Museion, Bolzano (2024); and Centro Pecci, Prato (2024).