Events by Region

The Golden Age - Ali Hassoun And Annika Geigel

Locality: Milan Region: Lombardy
from: 19 October 2026
from: 24 November 2026

Painting as a means of imagining a world in which different cultures, religions and eras coexist, and humanity rediscovers a harmonious relationship with nature and its own spiritual dimension. This is the idea at the heart of The Golden Age, an exhibition by Ali Hassoun and Annika Geigel, curated by Alessandro Riva, on view at Galleria Vik Milano from October 19 to November 24,2026.The exhibition opens on Monday, October 19,at 6: 30 pm. In Ali Hassoun’s paintings, women from different cultures, religions and backgrounds encounter the great images of art history, in a space where Africa, the Arab world and the contemporary West coexist with the legacy of Italian painting and the icons of Pop Art. Art becomes a shared landscape for this diverse humanity: references, colours, fabric patterns and the everyday presence of the figures create a universe in which everyone retains their own history while recognising themselves in the stories of others. Particularly emblematic is the diptych Il Buongoverno in Città e in Campagna (Good Government in the City and Countryside), which revisits Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s celebrated fresco cycle, placing monumental African women pouring grain before the architecture and landscapes of Siena. Their gesture takes on a ritual solemnity: the grain falls like golden rain, and the women appear as ancient mothers of the world, bearers of nourishment and wisdom, almost embodiments of a divine generosity bestowed upon the earth. The idea of good government thus opens onto a vision of humanity capable of sharing abundance and recognising prosperity as a common good. In Annika Geigel’s painting, by contrast, the Golden Age takes the form of an intimate, sensuous paradise, where female figures, birds, plants and flowers share the same vitality. The patterns of fabrics extend the movement of vegetation, while colour connects bodies and their surroundings. Women inhabit this universe as free presences, in a suspended time where differences of origin, age and social standing no longer establish hierarchies. Even when the garden gives way to domestic intimacy, a sense of continuity remains between inner life, nature and the objects of everyday existence. These two distinct approaches to painting converge in the belief that creating a new world goes hand in hand with inner transformation. Hassoun evokes a process of “transfiguration and refinement of the world” in his notes for the exhibition, likening it to the alchemists’ quest: the transformation of base metals into gold becomes a metaphor for working on oneself, gradually freeing oneself from the constraints of matter and learning to recognise, within everyday reality, the possibilities of another way of living. Drawing on his interpretation of ancient spiritual traditions, Hassoun extends this transformation to collective history, seeing the upheavals of the present as a passage from a cycle dominated by material existence towards a new chapter for humanity. “We are at the beginning of the next cycle of spiritual elevation, and the profound upheavals we are experiencing are signs of fulfilment and transfiguration, ” the artist writes. Painting can capture the first intimations of this emerging reality: artists engaged in an inner search, in Hassoun’s words, “sense its fragrance in their studios and infuse it into their works. ” This reality is what he calls the Golden Age: a state of harmony whose potential is already present in the world, taking visual form as a kind of modern Garden of Eden, an ideal, utopian microcosm. “This place is not outside our physical world, ” Hassoun writes, “but merely hidden, like particles of gold in the alchemist’s crucible. ” “The Golden Age of Ali Hassoun and Annika Geigel is a painterly utopia in which past, present and future inhabit the same space, and cultural differences become part of a possible harmony, ” writes curator Alessandro Riva. “Here the artist acts as a demiurge, an alchemist who blends memories, images and fragments of everyday life to create a new reality, a hortus conclusus in which hatred, violence, propaganda and nationalism lose their poisonous, stifling power. This is where the paradox lies: what might seem an escape from reality, a refuge in imagination in the face of the seemingly ineradicable violence of the present, becomes a deeper engagement with the real world and its hidden, subterranean workings. It invites us to recognise, beneath the deafening noise of conflict and mutual hatred, the possibility of another way of acting and being, one that begins within ourselves and in our relationships with others. Ali and Annika’s utopia is therefore above all humanistic and spiritual. It springs from the recognition of our shared humanity and finds in painting a place where this transformation can already begin: when the other ceases to be a foreigner or stranger, when memories become a common heritage, when differences cease to function as borders. It is a utopia that begins with the gaze and reaches into the way we inhabit the world. ” The Artists Born in Sidon, Lebanon, in 1964,Ali Hassoun moved to Italy in 1982.He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and graduated in Architecture in the same city in 1992.Holding both Lebanese and Italian citizenship, he has made the encounter between his Arab-Mediterranean roots and European culture a central theme of his practice. Major exhibitions include “Alla confluenza dei due mari”, curated by Martina Corgnati, at Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico in 2010,the year he also designed the banner for the July Palio; “Il POPolo vuole”, curated by Luca Beatrice, at the Museo Piaggio in Pontedera in 2013; a presentation of his work in the Lebanon Pavilion at Expo Milano in 2015; and his solo exhibition Crossover at Studio Guastalla in 2017.Born in Munich in 1995,Annika Geigel developed an interest in painting, Africa and the East from childhood. Self-taught, she has developed a figurative language rooted in encounters between cultures and the spiritual dimension of existence. Meeting Hassoun marked the beginning of an artistic and personal partnership spanning Milan, Munich and Dubai, where they presented the two-person exhibition Bidaya — “beginning” in Arabic — in 2023.Today they share a home and studio in Marina di Pietrasanta, where their daily exchange informs their respective practices, which also extend to ceramics and, in Hassoun’s case, bronze and mosaic. Info: THE GOLDEN AGE — Ali Hassoun and Annika Geigel Curated by Alessandro Riva Galleria Vik Milano, Via Silvio Pellico 8,Milan October 19 – November 24,2026 Opening: Monday, October 19,2026,at 6: 30 pm Paola Martino Press Office ufficiostampa@paolamartinopress. It +39 333 2939557

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