Mikael Lo Presti, "June - August": galerie frank elbaz, Paris
galerie frank elbaz is pleased to present June – August, the first solo exhibition by Stockholm-based artist Mikael Lo Presti with the gallery, on view from September 6 to October 11, 2025.
Lo Presti’s paintings draw on his engagement with art history, his family heritage, and visual cues that resonate with our shared contemporary experience. His work evokes a sense of belonging that is simultaneously anchored in multiple times and places.
In recent years, Lo Presti has developed a focused interest in still life, reinterpreting the genre through his own distinct and captivating visual language. His compositions also often depict solitary figures caught in moments of transition, pause, or reflection—motifs drawn from both personal memory and broader historical narratives.
Titled June – August, the exhibition refers to the peak summer season in the seaside towns of Southern Europe, with a particular focus on Sicily, where part of the artist’s paternal family still resides. A highly touristic time of year, when the city is transformed into a spectacle of images. Yet the artist’s investigation focuses on what happens in between — the gap between June and August, between collective imagination and lived reality. Back Street with Table encapsulates this tension: a still life of an orange on a marble table, placed centrally within a scene framed by plastic trash bags in a nondescript backstreet. A liminal image, poised between beauty and banality, timelessness and contemporaneity, illusion and the everyday.
In these new works, Lo Presti continues his exploration of seemingly ordinary subjects and objects—elements of the everyday, neither entirely specific nor fully generic—captured within a frame and transformed into painterly motifs. One such example is Boys by Red Facade, a composition depicting two boys on the street, set against an anonymous architectural backdrop. A fleeting, candid moment becomes a contemplative scene. Recurring motifs, such as a still life of an orange with a knife, speak to the artist’s ongoing engagement with the still life tradition—a memento mori for ephemeral moments—while the presence of a scooter alludes to contemporary paraphernalia.
Another important shift in this body of work lies in the increasingly pronounced materiality of the painted surface. In several pieces, Lo Presti incorporates sand into the priming layer, creating a textured ground that echoes the exhibition’s broader themes, evoking seaside imagery. This specific materiality marks a culminating point in the exhibition’s conceptual approach, while remaining firmly rooted in Lo Presti’s distinctive visual language.
The resulting works recall the tactile presence of frescoes, with their occasional cracks and layered pigments—an effect closely tied to the artist’s enduring engagement with the Italian Renaissance. The influence of his musée imaginaire—particularly from the Trecento to the Seicento—is unmistakable, with cherished references including Fra Angelico, Veronese, and Pontormo. This artistic period has long shaped Lo Presti’s practice, evident in his modeling of figures, his handling of surface and composition, as well as his distinctive use of color.
June – August marks Mikael Lo Presti’s first solo exhibition in France, bringing together a group of work that eloquently reflects the depth and subtlety of his practice. It features a series of intimate, small-scale still lifes—now central to the artist’s vocabulary—including a new subseries with cherries and roses, alongside several medium- and large-format compositions.
