gb agency

Gió Marconi is pleased to announce Motherboy, a group exhibition born out of the dialogue between curator Stella Bottai and artist Gray Wielebinski around the so-called “mammone” (mummy’s boy) – a notion that their own embodied experiences – as mother and son respectively – celebrate, critique, and reconfigure.
The exhibition draws on queer, feminist, and psychoanalytic understandings of the highly charged and symbolically rich relationality between mothers and sons to attend to themes of sacrifice, co-dependency, desire, identity, denial, hierarchies, possessiveness, and betrayal. Motherboy takes up the strange convergence of power encoded in the mother’s boy – the undervalued, often invisibilized labor of the mother versus the overindulged, privileged lot of the “Mama’s boy” – treating this as a starting point of broader political critique.
At the same time, it thinks expansively about the category of the motherboy, examining variations on this kinship form across different gendered, racial, and cultural configurations. Indexing the many abstracted modes in which we encounter this relation – through the imaginary of the mother tongue, motherland, the Holy Mother, and the prodigal son – Motherboy offers a point of entry into fundamental questions of love, power, and asymmetry.
The show features new and recent works selected in close dialogue with the participating artists. Spanning painting, collage, sculpture, video and installation, these pieces articulate different atmospheres across three floors of the gallery. Bodily postures form a motif across the show, contemplating the significance of certain actions – such as standing, posing, sleeping, hitting, or embracing – in connection to interpersonal hierarchies and emotional language.

For more information: https://giomarconi.com/en/exhibition/motherboy/press-release