José Freire

By my count, one of the world’s ten best galleries for over three decades. @airdeparis @airdeparis_flow

A moment from EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME currently open at Zero… in Milan. Left to right: Patrick Sarmiento, Liam Neff, Nicole Wermers. @werewolf_foot @liam_neff89 @nicwermers @galleriazero

I’ve constructed a playlist of 32 films to accompany my THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH AND HOME. You don’t have to watch all of them, a handful would do. Just remember, there might be a quiz. @galleriazero

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME Curated by José Freire @teamgal Lizzi Bougatsos, Sylvie Fleury, Richard Hoeck & John Miller, Christian Holstad, Elisabeth Kley, Liam Neff, Kayode Ojo, Patrick Sarmiento, Dash Snow, and Nicole Wermers 
- on view through July 24 @baby_seal777   @fleury49000   @richard_hoeck   @the_middle_of_the_day   #christianholstad @ehkley   @liam_neff89  @kayodeojo @werewolf_foot   #dashsnow @nicwermers   Ph 1: @robertomarossi Ph 2, 3: Violante Buonocore - #thehappinessproject #galleriazero #milano

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME Curated by José Freire @teamgal Lizzi Bougatsos, Sylvie Fleury, Richard Hoeck & John Miller, Christian Holstad, Elisabeth Kley, Liam Neff, Kayode Ojo, Patrick Sarmiento, Dash Snow, and Nicole Wermers 
- […] HEARTH & HOME is an installation that attempts to replicate, in skeletal form, a domestic setting — the gallery acting as a minimalist stage set for a piece of Brechtian theater. There are chairs, lighting fixtures, vases, vanity mirrors, and other objects of interior design. The works on view, however, are hardly props. Although they sometimes echo the real in their form, or physically incorporate functional items, they remain fictive. The placement of the works — which include sculpture, painting, photography, and video — across the two floors of Zero... generates a jagged, paratactic meaning, leaving viewers to connect these points of signification to each other and to the exhibition’s motif: to follow its hermeneutic line. […] - on view through July 24 @baby_seal777   @fleury49000   @richard_hoeck   @the_middle_of_the_day   #christianholstad @ehkley   @liam_neff89  @kayodeojo @werewolf_foot   #dashsnow @nicwermers   Ph: @robertomarossi - #thehappinessproject #galleriazero #milano

Thanks to all the nice folks who came out for the opening of EPISODE 3 in Milan. My only regret is that I forgot to spend the 3 hours taking pictures. So many missed opportunities! @galleriazero

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME Curated by José Freire @teamgal Lizzi Bougatsos, Sylvie Fleury, Richard Hoeck & John Miller, Christian Holstad, Elisabeth Kley, Liam Neff, Kayode Ojo, Patrick Sarmiento, Dash Snow, and Nicole Wermers 
“Remember that in our day every cultured man, even the most healthy, is most irritable in his own home and among his own family.”   
Anton Chekhov opening tomorrow, April 17, from 6 pm on view through July 24 @baby_seal777   @fleury49000   @richard_hoeck   @the_middle_of_the_day   #christianholstad @ehkley   @liam_neff89  @kayodeojo @werewolf_foot   #dashsnow @nicwermers   - #thehappinessproject #galleriazero #milano

Rejecting momentous shared moments in favor of small private ones, Liam Neff’s paintings are fragments of quotidian existence that glisten like mosaics. There’s enough there — in the color and the structure — to pull us in, but these pictures remain enigmatic, details of a world that is only now, through the artist’s intercession, being brought to our attention. The casual nature of his chosen images is belied by the tender and diligent manner in which they’ve been rendered. His paintings of objects lit by artificial means always have a slight edge to them, like items from 90’s neo-noirs, sometimes calling to mind the chintzy allure of stained glass. On the other hand, Neff’s daytime window views, all urban in the extreme, are odes to potentiality, taking place on the one day in a hundred where the New York City sky is a triumph of blue. Liam Neff will form a part of THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME at Zero… in Milan, opening on 17 April 2026. @liam_neff89 @galleriazero

Dash Snow’s photography manifests, like his sculptural and 2-D assemblages, a very strong sense of style, in the postmodern sense. When one reflects on his choices — the saturated, often lurid color typical of the Polaroid, the softly expressive possibilities of black and white 35mm film — one sees an artist skilled at masterfully manufacturing a vision that is deliberately transhistorical. His work persistently slips free of an association with a particular period. Dressed in the visual tropes of bygone eras — his collages can call to mind both Weimar Republic high art and the cut-and-paste style of the subcultural leaflet — Snow has always engaged with an aesthetics of authenticity and resistance. Few artists of his generation have made work as stridently incendiary as Snow, however, amidst the chaos, the sex, drugs, race baiting and Sadam Hussein, there is a diaristic thread that documents a complex individual who was, among other things, a loving father. The photographs that form the core of his practice serve not only as a chronicle of a community, they trace the life of a family man. Image: Dash Snow, Untitled (Window), 2007, chromogenic print on matte paper, 96 x 64 cm. Courtesy of the Dash Snow Archive, NYC and Móran Móran. To be included in THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME. Opening at Zero… in Milan on 17 April 2026. @galleriazero @moranmorangallery

Nicole Wermers’ sculptures often appear as still lives of objects arranged and/or altered to form perfect aesthetic bundles, frequently hiding the artist’s own labor within a fiction of completeness. They present themselves as seemingly inevitable conflations and, no matter how surrealist some of her juxtapositions, it is that very unity that defines them. That the work is witty and playful is merely a surface ruse that disguises an aching view of the isolation written into contemporary social spaces: the kitchen can be as lonely as the community center or the local café, each of them merely a location for the selling of products. I like to think that if Jeanne Dielman were an artist, instead of a housewife, she would have made these sculptures. @nicwermers

When viewed from the outside, the home appears to be a fortress of stability, where values are passed from one generation to another. Oftentimes, however, the home is a site of nascent resistance, a breeding ground for opposition. But that utility can only be seen when one is on its inside, hidden away from the hegemonic forces that suffuse the outside air. Language, government, the fifth estate, the arts are all sites where our norms are negotiated and perpetuated, but the home is by far the most potent. The physical structure “house” serves as the locus for family, writ large. And the family is more than a social construct. It is also a psychical institution, bringing along with it powerful, dangerous and destabilizing forces: emotions, aspirations, the erotic, the private, the individual. And the family’s envelope, where it remains both outside community and a part thereof, is this house, with its store of objects that signify status, house memory, and help form that great ineffable: taste. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME opens at Zero…, Milan on 17 April and runs through 27 July 2026. The show is made up of work by Lizzi Bougatsos, Sylvie Fleury, Richard Hoeck & John Miller, Christian Holstad, Elisabeth Kley, Liam Neff, Kayode Ojo, Patrick Sarmiento, Dash Snow, and Nicole Wermers. @baby_seal777 @fleury49000 @richard_hoeck @the_middle_of_the_day @ehkley @liam_neff89 @kayodeojo @werewolf_foot @nicwermers @galleriazero

Steven Parrino
31 August through 02 October 1999 This Parrino exhibition is comprised of three large-scale works: “Zodiac,” “Stockade, Existential Trap for Speed Freaks,” and “Dancing on Graves.” Each of these is a black monochrome painting that has been made, broken and revived. These pieces continue to explore the poetic distortions available within Parrino’s brand of minimalism-a generous, committed, and gentle art made by a painter both radical and academic. Exploring and deifying the deformed within a classical structure, the guts of his life spill out like embarrassments on white tablecloth. One could say that Steven Parrino, as an artist, has been obstinate, tenacious, however, within a confined set of parameters he has invented a practice and excelled at its constant reinterpretation. An intense dedication, coupled with a pliant rigor has kept his work alive and finds it forever sparking the interest of younger viewers. Parrino’s accidents implicate the gallery space in a collision of cruelty that reveres and rejects painting’s complacency and which speaks of the discipline at the heart of any rejection of conformity. The performative nature of Parrino’s process is central to this exhibition where a video component presents the supposed “glamour” of the artist’s studio mated with an absurd idea of work ethic. Manuela, who dances at Vampyros Lesbos, functions here as a Muse, of sorts. Hired specifically to dance on one of Parrino’s paintings, the exotic dancer performs on a surface which the artist then slices with a circular saw. A projection of the idealized studio, this video work also seems to convey a fin-de-siecle tristesse manifested increasingly as a nostalgia for the punk era.