On the 7-8-9 October 24 galleries will open jointly in Milan for START the weekend for contemporary art. On this occasion, francesca kaufmann is presenting the second solo-show of Lily van der Stokker.
Lily van der Stokker’s wall paintings challenge the official aura surrounding the concept of art. The vocabulary of signs displayed by Lily van der Stokker is the result of years of experimentation which has formed a world of decoration driven to its extreme consequences and invested with a happily subversive role.
Lily van der Stokker unfolds a poetics of the negligible. The apparent futility of the graciousness of her dynamic and organic patterns reveals a firmly set orientation towards an art that is fulfilling and involving rather than exclusive.
And it is to the negligible that the themes of her phrasal inputs also seem to be dedicated. Lily van der Stokker opposes official, necessitating and forceful messages with references of a more intimate sphere of life, by peeping into prosaic, daily existence. The practical details, the small drama-less tragedies, all those minor discrepancies which disturb individual reality are whispered rather than shouted and instead of being worried by images that would confirm their message, they are cleansed by their contrasting graceful decoration.
For Lily van der Stokker, wall painting is a means through which to manifest pure, intimate selfaffirmation rather than communicating its traditional public message. The ambiguity of phrases in the wall paintings evokes a collective dimension that can share art experiences because it is also founded on banal, stereotypic and everyday talk.

The ‘Family Problems’ project presented at francesca kaufmann is an installation where wall painting meets sculpture to create an environment characterised by a visual and visionary playfulness in themes drawn from simple household management. The sterile matter-of-factness of everyday problems, economic problems and their family dramas, is enveloped in an aesthetic and joyful space at odds with reality. Lily van der Stokker interprets wall painting as the meeting place of the subjective and the public sphere, a residue of freedom seeping into reality. Decorative Maximalism and dauntless display of the banal meet to generate ambiguous seduction devoid of prudishness.

The artist was born in Hertogenbosch in 1954. She lives and works between Amsterdam and New York