From April 16, 2026, OTHER SIZE GALLERY by WORKNESS CLUB is hosting. Residuals, the first contemporary art exhibition in Milan by Alessandro Filograna, curated by Maria Savarese. A project that transforms what remains into a starting point, exploring the fine line between memory, matter and identity.
Born in Lecce in 1985, Alessandro Filograna is a self-taught artist whose research has been built entirely by direct experimentation, far from academic circuits. His work moves between two avowed influences: Pop Art, for its use of the icon as a visual material, and Arte Povera, for its focus on the fragment and recuperation. “I am an artist who works by transformation,” he says of himself. “For me, art is not decoration. It is an act of awareness. It is a way of transforming what remains – residue, fragments, excesses – into something that makes sense.”
What makes this exhibition unique
Residuals back to the image. The core of the exhibition is collage in dialogue with silkscreen printing, flanked by a reduced presence of three-dimensional works with salvaged materials. The subject is the figure of the Madonna, chosen not as an exclusively religious reference but as one of the most reproduced and layered icons of Western visual culture. “Starting from this image means confronting the weight of the past,” says the artist. “In the collage the icon is not destroyed, but traversed. The past meets the present. The sacred dialogues with the everyday.” The face remains recognizable, but it bears marks, layers, and visual interference that modify it without erasing it.
The title of the solo exhibition refers not to the idea of waste, but to that of survival. In the three-dimensional works, the residue is physical, made of recovered matter; in the collages and silkscreens, it is cultural, it is memory, it is sedimented image. Traditionally associated with the reproducibility of the image, in Filograna’s work screen printing is used in a paradoxical way: not to multiply, but to fix a unique moment in the process. Each frame is made for a single work, transforming a serial technique into an unrepeatable gesture in which color layering becomes a metaphor for time. The layers of color are obtained not through separate matrices, but through overlapping and cut-out sheets of newspaper, built up progressively to generate the desired form and effect. This layered structure is then covered by the final printed image. When the print is completed, the work is not simply a reproduced figure, but the visible trace of a process. An icon that changes face, layers, updates, but retains a recognizable core. Like identity. “Nothing is pure,” the artist concludes. “Everything is composed.”
“The artist acts as an archaeologist of the present: he collects forgotten materials, sedimented images, cultural fragments and recomposes them into new visual structures. The practice of recovery becomes, therefore, a true critical gesture. In an age characterized, in fact, by incessant production and rapid consumption of images, the author proposes a slowing down of the gaze,” comments Maria Savarese, curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Prearo Editore.
Come discover “Residuals” by Alessandro Filograna, from OTHER SIZE GALLERY by WORKNESS CLUB.
OPENING THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 6 P.M.
ON DISPLAY UNTIL JUNE 5, 2026
Hours: Monday – Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
WORKNESS CLUB (2ND FLOOR) – VIA A.MAFFEI, 1 – MILAN
