Vistamare is pleased to present “Desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways”, the first solo exhibition by Goshka Macuga at the gallery in Milan.
The entropy embedded in the landscape tells a story of endless transformation, an incessant flux where creation and destruction continuously intertwine. Time goes on relentlessly, marking the history of existence with decay and whispering the promise of a new beginning. The earth, constantly changing, bears the burden of this rhythm, oscillating between ruin and rebirth, chaos and balance.
Landscapes are never really immune to disorder, even though we often imagine them as settled symbols of stability. Catastrophes, whether natural disasters or wars, shatter the known order in an instant. Yet, after the disaster, a new horizon emerges: fields of debris, distorted morphologies, ecosystems on the brink. Amidst the ruins, nature is in motion again. Erosion, atmospheric conditions and slow shifts mark the path towards a new fragile equilibrium, always different, but never completely defeated.
Progress certainly requires sacrifice: the abandonment of the old to make way for the new. From the ashes of destruction, a different era is born. Artists, like alchemists, have always used destruction as a catalyst for transformation. In times of crisis, their work has become and has always been a reminder, a spark that ignites change. But a fundamental question remains: is destruction merely a troubled reflection of our evolving consciousness or a primal force linked as much to human ambition as to the restless motions of the planet?
The exhibition Desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways by Goshka Macuga fits into this discourse. Her canvases bear witness to natural cataclysms and man’s destructive impulses: wars, environmental destruction, volcanic eruptions, deep scars left on the earth. Among them is a painting dated 1996, the only one to show an early interest in the medium of painting – otherwise only expressed in more recent works – which shows a solitary dog, perhaps a wolf, lost in a desolate landscape. It is an echo of Buck in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, a symbol of survival and cruel loneliness. Like the glow of an explosion or the smoke of an eruption, this presence recurs in the artist’s work. Her painting has never before, and certainly not now, sought to master the medium, but rather to expand its language, dissolving subject and landscape into a single, unstable breath.
Charles Bukowski wrote: ‘I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions‘ .
With these words, the American writer intended to celebrate everything that is raw and imperfect, the same forces that shape landscapes and human experience. Entropy is not order, but fracture, resilience and reinvention. Like Bukowski’s desperate men, Macuga’s paintings elude the polished and explores places of fracture, where explosions of colour evoke war, trauma and environmental collapse. Her canvases do not tell linear stories, but become unstable and unpredictable. The solitary figure traversing the wild landscape is a symbol of both resistance and transformation.
The new series of paintings in the exhibition is not presented isolated, but immersed in a landscape that becomes both scenery and device. The space is turned into an ideal cave: a sculptural landscape populated by stalactites and stalagmites, forms that drip and build up layers in space, generating a sort of habitat where paintings find shelter. The rocky formations surround the canvases or serve as observation points for lingering to linger on. This is not just a stylistic trick, but a conscious return to a primordial image that has been part of Macuga’s vocabulary since her beginnings, when she set up works inside a papier-mâché cave, first in Cave and then in A Mountain and a Valley (1999). Now, however, an entirely new quality is added, that of manifesting themselves as cinematically staged objects, persuasive expressions of an archaeology that takes over at the very moment they are brought into the world to be immediately disposed of. Inside the cave they grow like an organism around the paintings, transforming the exhibition space into an immersive and unsettling environment.
A sense of horror also comes into play, not as a simple aesthetic of the macabre, but as a political language. In Macuga’s vision, horror becomes a tool for exposing the processes of collapse, disintegration and crisis that run through both human and environmental history. In this ‘pop horror forest’, painting itself becomes a cave within the canvas: the pictorial surface becomes an extension of space, and space itself seems to reflect the artist’s imagery.
Thus, the cave, an archetype of refuge and origin, an ancestral place of human narrative, is now transformed into an organic and visionary trap, which envelops painting and magnifies it at once, taking it beyond the canvas, into the realm of the formless and the uncanny. And it is in this cave that images of flares desperately trying to take off also find their place, ambiguous symbols of exploration and failure, clear echoes of Macuga’s GONOGO project, in which every impulse towards elsewhere can turn into a fall, and every rise remains suspended between ambition and ruin.
Milovan Farronato
from a conversation between Goshka Macuga and Milovan Farronato
Goshka Macuga (Warsaw, 1967) is a multidisciplinary artist who blends different forms of expression into a complex and meaningful narrative. Her work is based on historical and archival research, building a bridge between historical documentation and truth, while questioning historiography, political structures, and the most urgent issues of our time as a form of institutional critique. Macuga brings to light affinities and connections, revealing what would otherwise go unnoticed. The artist uncovers hidden connections and meanings, challenging the viewer to see what would otherwise remain unseen.
Macuga has held solo exhibitions at major institutions such as the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 2022), MUSAC (León, Spain, 2021), Fondazione Prada (Milan, 2016), New Museum (New York, 2016), Kunsthalle Basel (2009), and Tate Britain (London, 2007). Her work was included in Documenta (2012), and she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008. Since 2021, she has been involved in the Tales & Tellers project, launched and promoted by Miu Miu, and in 2024 she was elected as a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Macuga lives and works in London.