From Thursday, February 13 to Saturday, March 15, 2025 Fondazione ICA Milano
in collaboration with PROGETTO LUDOVICO presents Grex, an exhibition by Sacha Kanah (Milan, 1981), curated by PROGETTO LUDOVICO and installed in the Fondazione’s project room.

The project is designed specifically for the spaces of Fondazione ICA Milano: the artist invites the visitor to explore the exhibition environment from the outside, then enter the project room and experience an amplified perception of space and the body, where the dominant sensations are those of claustrophobia and pressure suggested by the industrial objects presented.

Grex investigates the relationship between the artwork and the space, in which Kanah intervenes by shaping a bulky industrial element whose changes and possible relationships created between matter and form, voids and solids, interior and exterior he observes. The artist works on an immersive structure inserted in a constricted context, where a series of 1,000-liter capacity tanks, taken from an industrial dyehouse and cleared of debris, odors and traces, breathes in space as a living form. The exhibition grew out of a long process of observation, study, and mutations that draw on the architecture of Le Corbusier, the philosophy of Lefebvre, and the scientific and geographical theories of Doreen Massey.

The title of the exhibition, Grex, draws inspiration from botany and refers to hybrid plants. The artist adopts this concept to explore the relationship between humans and nature and to narrate his research on plastic materials, which he treats as mixed forms, somewhere between the living and the inanimate.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Doodles series, which involves a selection of new works made from hollow objects and semi-rigid containers from industrial use. These are vacuum sculptures that deform under atmospheric pressure, curling around a rigid core inserted by the artist. The Doodles are held in tension by ajar valves, where a micro-spiral allows the form to relax over time, performing a slow, continuous inhalation. The result is organic and unpredictable forms, the result of an “error”, grafted into the system by the artist to explore the consequences of chance and its infinite variables.

Sacha Kanah’s artistic practice is characterized by the interplay between philosophical and cultural concepts and explores complex issues such as identity and language in the spatial encounter between “wild and synthetic.” The artist uses a variety of media, including sculpture and installation, to create works that often challenge aesthetic and conceptual conventions. The exhibition, coordinated by Camilla Previ, is accompanied by a text written for the show by critic, curator and journalist Rossella Farinotti.

Grex is curated by PROGETTO LUDOVICO, a research platform dedicated to for industry-related art production and exhibition. Founded in Milan in 2021 by Lorenzo Perini Natali, it aims to investigate the relationship between art and industry and the creative expressions that arise from that synergy.