More than 20 artworks including large canvases and small format drawings for the Danish artist’s first exhibition in the gallery’s Milan venue

5th July – 9th September 2023*

Milan, 5th July 2023. #cadogangallery presents In a Landscape, the first personal exhibition, held in the gallery’s Milan venue, of Danish artist Leonardo Anker Vandal (Copenaghen, 1988) who has been living and working for some time in Brescia, Italy.

 For this exhibition Vandal, a long-time abstract artist, draws inspiration from the art of painters of the Chinese Song dynasty (12^th century), who created large format painted scrolls depicting mainly mountain views. A series of large autumn-coloured canvases was born from the awe these landscapes inspired, which evokes the oriental landscapes, transfiguring them. A journey the artist embarks on in a land of fragile forms, made of implied locations that flow into abstraction. In some cases, it seems possible to see the mountain profiles emerging from the mist, in others the sun imposing its presence from behind the clouds, while the human element is completely absent, as indeed in oriental views.

 Vandal believes that his work has its own will. As much as the artist’s generative act is an essential condition for the creation of an artwork, he states that all that happens on the canvas is outside of his control. This thesis is supported by the technique he chooses, which consists in the pouring of pigment mixed with water directly on the surface of the painting: “water does what it wants”, he says. Even when he does intervene directly with a paintbrush, Vandal hides his tracks, leaving no brushstroke visible.

 Leonardo Anker Vandal is a multidisciplinary artist who works with different languages, like painting, sculpture, installations, and writing. The process by which the artist creates art is a type of catharsis and the often autumn-like colour of his artwork creates a deep and therapeutic feeling of serenity. Nostalgia and melancholy permeate the experience of his work, which exclusively explores the unseen and the subconscious. The artist transforms his traumatic life experiences in a poetic and enigmatic visual language, using any means.

 Active since 1980, Cadogan Gallery has always stood out for the careful support it lends to the work of emerging, mid-career, established or critically acclaimed artists, and for the constant commitment in tending to the relationships woven with generations of collectors and artists for over 40 years. Alongside the first gallery in South Kensington – London, and a temporary space for special projects in Hampshire, Cadogan today adds an international perspective to its exhibition program by opening its first foreign venue in Milan. From spring 2023, in a typically Milanese well-lit space, with an approach centered on enhancing single artists and a clear aesthetic identity, the new space will be the perfect place to showcase not just the works of artists who grew up with the gallery, but also a new emerging generation.

* The gallery will be closed to the public from 30^th July to 4^th September inclusive.