Milan. Sari Ember’s moais at Galleria Campari

“Our stories all sound alike. With nothing to reveal or hide”, wrote the American poet John Koethe in 1945 to denounce the vanity of the artist and the meaning of his passage in a wasted land. And it is from here that Sari Ember, winner of the Artissima 2017’s Campari Art Prize now on show at Galleria Campari in Milan until September 9th, started her tale.

“Since our stories all sound alike” is a series of busts, masks and faces that tell a story: that of the artist, born in Sao Paulo but trained in Budapest – where she graduated in photography and visual arts – Paris, Brussels and Brno, where she took part in residency projects and collective exhibitions; that of her talking sculptures, suspended between a mythical past and a future yet to be defined; and finally that of the Galleria Campari, founded in 2010 to celebrate, in the company’s 150th anniversary, the connection between the liqueur brand and its communication through art and design.

Sculptures-characters in granite, marble, glazed ceramics and limestone – “heavy” materials yet so warm, familiar – speak in silence as inhabitants of a living room, yours. A domestic and theatrical setting in which these metaphysical and primitivist sculptures take position as actors on stage. It is precisely for works as Four Blue Heads or Face of Stone I, modern moai (votive statues of Easter Island) of domestic use – that Sari Ember has been awarded. Magic figures that, like those by Mirò or Klee, bring us back to childhood and enshrine memories, identities, personal and collective stories. That all sound alike, but still they deserve to be told.