On May 21, 2025, Galleria Matria in Milan, specialized in contemporary photography, opened the solo exhibition Homage by artist Cornelia Hediger. The show brings together the artist’s most recent works, which highlight her primary medium: analog photomontage.
Cornelia Hediger, “Homage”, installation view at Galleria Matria, Milano, ph. courtesy Galleria Matria
The exhibition features a series of photographic tributes to the New Objectivity movement, an artistic current that emerged in 1920s Germany, known for its raw realism and emotionally charged depictions of the economic crisis of the time. Onto this stark visual language, Hediger overlays her self-portraits, fragmenting herself, as in the installation Split Personalities, in which her image multiplies and disassembles in a play of shifting identity. In this way, she reinterprets New Objectivity with a surreal and ironic lens, reanimating its forms and becoming, herself, a critical device, not with the presumption of rewriting Western art history, but rather to explore how identity can be inserted into a layered cultural context.
Cornelia Hediger, “Hedwing and Hermine – Homage to my Grandmothers”, 2025, photography, wall installation composed of 9 individual panels 75 x 75 cm (each), total 225 x 225 cm, ph. courtesy Galleria Matria
Another example is the photographic installation Two Children (2025), a unique piece composed of several photographic sheets that form a visual puzzle, where Hediger superimposes her own face onto the bodies of two children. Her practice becomes a true act of translation: the artist’s corporeality acts as a medium for engaging with the legacy of the past, layering characters within the photographic frame like stage figures. In doing so, Hediger becomes the author of a narrative that is both critical and performative, free of judgment but infused with a pure and ironic gaze that lends the works a deeply personal tone. Hediger places herself within rooms and constructions that are deeply personal and bizarre. The theme of the enclosed space is central also in the Puppenhaus series, presented in the exhibition catalog, where the domestic setting takes on claustrophobic and dissociative connotations, yet becomes the ideal stage for her photographic performances.
Cornelia Hediger, “Vincent”, 2024, photographic print, photomontage, mixed technique, 75 x 100 cm, ph. courtesy Galleria Matria
Virginia Woolf, in her famous essay A Room of one’s own, wrote: «A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction». This quote resonates powerfully within the exhibition, where the act of creation and imagination unfolds within the confined spaces of the prints and their staged environments, spaces through which the artist explores and overturns the power dynamics of inherited imagery. In the catalog of the landmark 1978 exhibition The Materialization of Language, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio, language is described as a core element of feminist artistic practice, since speech had been denied to women for centuries. It is precisely in these intimate and constrained places that, for both Woolf and Hediger, a possibility of transformation emerges: spaces where vision is overturned, imagination becomes ambiguous and shadows are revealed.
Cornelia Hediger, “Raven”, 2025, bas-relief figure, photographic print, photomontage, unique work, 54 x 35 cm, ph. courtesy Galleria Matria
With a theatrical approach, Hediger alters her poses, transforming makeup and hair to construct a cohesive and evocative collage. The viewer is drawn into an altered dimension, one reminiscent of Alice’s journey through the looking glass in Lewis Carroll’s tale. A deeper understanding of the exhibition is also supported by the Homage artist book, placed in a corner of the gallery: a tool that allows viewers to observe the layering of faces, the iconographic references and the evolution of the project into collage. This is an effective way to reveal the artist’s creative process and poetic vocabulary. A feminist perspective also offers a key to interpreting the curatorial framework of the exhibition, particularly through the lens of the female gaze: a theoretical practice that originated in cinema studies, aimed at analyzing the representation of women in media and deconstructing the male gaze as a culturally embedded power structure.
Cornelia Hediger, “Homage”, installation view at Galleria Matria, Milano, ph. courtesy Galleria Matria
As art critic and historian Erica Sanfratello – author of one of the catalog texts – points out, it is crucial to understand the female gaze not as a biologically feminine perspective, but as the recognition of a cultural construct. In this view, the female figure becomes both subject and critical vehicle for reflecting on patriarchal dynamics. To embrace this gaze, according to Sanfratello, is to embrace the vulnerability inherent in social processes, with all their contradictions and power relationships. Vulnerability thus emerges as a creative tool, an opportunity to carve into the cracks of dominant power structures and make visible what is often unseen. On view until September 10, 2025, Homage is a rich artistic project, grounded in a strong and structured theoretical framework. It invites viewers to delve deeply into Hediger’s practice and engage with her work on a level far removed from superficial interpretation.
Info:
Cornelia Hediger. Homage
21/05/2025 – 10/09/2025
GALLERIA MATRIA
Via Melzo, 34 – Milano
www.galleriamatria.it
Giulia Elisa Bianchi (Varese, 1998) is an emerging curator and author. After the First Level academic diploma in Disciplines for the Valorization of Cultural Heritage at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, she decided to follow her interest in contemporary art at the two-year specialist course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at New Naba Academy of Fine Arts. She considers curating “a writing of spaces and a way of valorising the expressive needs of the artist”.
NO COMMENT