15-17
05 2026
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14/05/2026
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30/06/2026
Exhibitions

rgw 2026

Imogen Allen

Echo

Text by Maria Vittoria Pinotti
MONTI8 is delighted to present Echo, first Italian solo show of the British painter Imogen Allen, opening on May 14th. On this occasion, the artist created a new body of works that develop her interest for nature and the way we experience it. Plants, fungi and other elements of the ecosystem are the starting point of her reaserch, focused on the emotions the painting convey instead on the representation of a story. For this exhibition, Allen continues to develop a theme she has started recently, the butterfly wings. Through this subject she doesn’t want to depict these wings just as a symbol or create a narrative, but she is more interested in offering the viewer a spiritual and emotional experience of them.
Looking at these paintings, in fact, we are invited to explore our subconscious that responds to sensorial inputs suggested by the vivid colours and natural shapes that fill the canvas. Nevertheless, these shapes are presented in a new way, dramatically zooming the details to approach them from a different perpective. Maria Vittoria wrote in her essay: “For Imogen Allen, painting does not simply mean representing, but investigating the most visible part of reality in a macroscopic way, deepening and scrutinising it. Although the starting point is nature and the way it is perceived, each work establishes a relationship with what appears most immediate, allowing us to know it in the same measure in which it makes us lose it.
Focusing on butterfly wings, the artist develops an analytical research that explores their forms, light, and depth. This anatomy is enlarged beyond measure, and the veins and membrane that compose it lose their ordinary appearance, transforming into an extension of forms and tones. In this process, painting abandons its descriptive and mimetic quality, turning into a visual labyrinth for both mind and eye. Here emerges the visionary value of her research, as theorised by Wassily Kandinsky: form, even when completely abstract and geometric, possesses an inner sound, and it is for this reason that in the works on display seeing is transformed into listening, so that each painting merges into the others until it composes the echoes of a single great sonority.
” The connection to the natural world has always been an important element of the creative process for the artist. Growing up in Cornwall, since she was a child she focused her attention on the mysterious and complex side of nature, leaning to investigate her surroundings on a meditative and energetic level reather than being interested by a simpler idea of beauty. As a result of this approach, each painting holds an intimate and visceral intention also related to ancient mystical traditions.