Project Room #12 | Rebecca Ackroyd. Underfoot

With Underfoot by Rebecca Ackroyd, the third and final appointment of the Project Room 2019 opens, the exhibition series established by the Foundation to explore the research and production of artists under 40 who are innovatively investigating sculpture. Over the past year, guest curator Cloé Perrone has selected the works of Sophia al-Maria, Caroline Mesquita, and Rebecca Ackroyd, three young international artists who, within a multidisciplinary practice, also use sculpture, expanding its very definition.

Rebecca Ackroyd (1987, UK) is a versatile artist who employs practices that include sculpture, drawing, writing, and in her work, she blends the brutality of the urban environment with the dreamlike world. Her exhibitions often reconstruct degraded spaces, permeated by real atmospheres, aimed at increasing awareness and consciousness of the theme of abandonment.

For her first solo exhibition in Milan, the British artist presents a large site-specific installation that occupies the entire space of the Foundation. The works are placed inside a greenhouse, a structure typically used for cultivation, creating an immersive space suspended between dream and reality. Rebecca Ackroyd's focus is on a hybrid definition of home, capable of reflecting various paradoxes of contemporary society while simultaneously contemplating the nostalgia of past eras.

The sculptures presented serve as fragments of a conversation, memories or stories, almost like unfinished sentences before the emergence of a complete picture. Their transparency alludes to a spectral echo of reality, oscillating between ideas of domestic life, the flower power movement of the ‘70s, and the psychoanalytic couch – a space for introspection and self-discovery. At a time when global tensions reach overwhelming proportions, Ackroyd initiates an intimate reflection on the notions of sanctuary, home, and belonging.