Sofia Cacciapaglia: Apparizione

April 29, 2026 – June 27, 2026

Sofia Cacciapaglia’s home studio in Italy is situated in a neighborhood where there are many shops, whose owners often leave their boxes in the courtyard nearby. Cacciapaglia, who already had a vibrant painting practice on canvas, started taking these pieces of cardboard into her studio and using them as material to paint on. This new material to Cacciapaglia was much more urgent and gestural than the slower and methodological approach she has in her oil paintings on canvas. It is not the only way that this urgency appears in Cacciapaglia’s practice. The women in her paintings appear with an immediacy - belonging both to every era, and to none, like an apparition of an angel or spirit. This concept of apparition is crucial in framing Cacciapaglia’s practice at large, and the works collected for this exhibition in particular.

Apparizione

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines apparition as: 1) an unusual or unexpected sight: phenomenon 2) the act of becoming visible: appearance, with Latin origins - the prefix is from the Latin appāri-, meaning "to be visible, be evident, attend, serve." 1 Cacciapaglia’s women are unusual, they are phenomena, they are other-worldly, and they are dramatically visible. They dance, they gossip, they whisper, they gesture, they lounge, they rest, and they ponder. They are wise and omnipotent apparitions. But beyond the figures themselves, the newer landscape works in the exhibition create the context and set the scene, becoming the site of apparition, not unlike the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz, and they are often painted on cardboard. Sofia says of these works “Cardboard, like wrapping paper, has this neutral yet elegant and natural quality—that camel-brown tone. What I especially love is its inner structure: when you paint on it, it feels as if there is already a trace underneath, something that adds a kind of poetic mark to the brushstroke. Even the folds and lines of the boxes are important to me.” 2 Even the material choice reflects the concept of apparition - a fleeting and powerful presence. A secret vision that both lasts forever, and disappears.

Depictions of, or references to, apparitions have been present in diverse practices and genres of art history since time immemorium. One relevant example (of which there are many) is the French Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau’s 1876 watercolor Apparition depicting his version of the Biblical story of the beheading of John the Baptist utilizing the femme fatale Salome, whoconjures, and casts a spell. In the Biblical narrative Moreau references, Salome performs a dance so seductive that the King grants her any wish. Her presence transforms those around her. In Cacciapaglia’s painting above, two women in red striped dresses dance a spell of their own, their expressions focused and intense. Between the two of them, there are fifteen feet, implying quick-footed movement. Unlike Moreau’s painting, which depicts the seductive dance after it has already been concluded, we encounter Cacciapaglia’s women in the middle of their dance. The apparition exists in both their very presence, and in what they may call forth.

Of Moreau’s depiction of Salome, art historian Peter Cooke highlights the immobility and rigidity of her figure - she is not moving quickly to entertain, she moves with intention and complete control - and it appears that her body and mind occupy different terrains. He says “dance often encompasses moments of rest 3 .” Indeed, even in dance, many of Cacciopaglia’s women’s eyes are at rest or entirely closed, and several paintings depict the women in complete rest - lounging in fields together. Cooke says, “Moreau was able to emphasise the timeless universality of his subject, which, in his eyes, represented a ‘femme éternelle - & the eternal woman.” 4 In Moreau’s Apparition, Salome calls forth a spell, a mysterious and magical ritual, that renders all who surround her speechless and under her control. The apparition is visible only to Salome, but revealed to the viewer of the painting, and in Cacciapaglia’s paintings, for those experiencing them, the women themselves become apparitions.

But, Cacciapaglia’s eternal women do not enchant alone. She says of her figures: “women supporting one another, looking at each other, touching hands, eyes, feet, holding each other in an embrace — is fundamental. It’s the heart from which the composition begins: the contact between these women, how they support each other, is at the core of my work.” 5 The women in Sofia’s practice call both to each other and to us - dancing, seducing, celebrating, resting, and perhaps, if we are lucky, enchanting us, and rebuilding their surroundings into a more hopeful future. As Jenny Hval describes in her novel Girls Against God, “We pull the structures down with us.” Cacciapaglia’s work and her community of women so embedded in the idea of apparition, exist outside of the boundaries of the social structure, of time, and of material. They are not images we are meant to intellectually engage with. They are alive.

Apparitions render us speechless. Those who have experienced an other-worldly presence or vision, often have trouble describing in words their experiences. Apparitions exist in the indescribable parts of our bodies and spirits, in between our blood and bones, in the nuances of our minds. Cacciapaglia herself says “Women have always fascinated me in my work because these women are symbolic — eternal, ancestral, not tied to any specific time or era, yet speaking across all times. It’s not that I don’t want to tell my own story as a woman, but my work starts from me to speak to everyone. This is also why I choose not to give titles: I believe that the language of painting is a poetic language that stands on its own and has nothing to do with words.” In conversation with the sites of apparition - the fields and flowers, which Cacciapaglia also calls feminine, on both permanent and temporary material, we are invited to engage in our own apparitions, our visions, the poetic and indescribable. In this way, this exhibition ‘Apparazione’, brilliantly sets the stage and welcomes us in.

Emma Saperstein

About Artist

Xiaoze Xie (China/ US) was born in China the same year as the Cultural Revolution and as a young man he was a witness to the Tiananmen revolt. Since 1992 he has lived in the United States, working as an artist and professor of art with frequent trips back to his native country. These experiences have given him a unique perspective from which to observe the role of books and newspapers in the cultural life of China and the West and the ways that media preserve and distort our understanding of the world.

Xie explores these ideas in paintings with a realism so intense that it shades into abstraction. He has produced haunting representations of the battered spines of long neglected library books, of dusty stacks of old newspapers, and of fragments of front pages that offer glimpses of long forgotten events and personages. Bringing his concerns up to date, he has also made paintings that capture otherwise ephemeral scenes that flicker across the screen of the Chinese blogging website Weibo. Such works remind us that books, newspapers, and more recently, the internet are all subject to the vagaries of time, neglect and deliberate destruction and manipulation. One body of work involves the discovery and recovery of a cache of ancient Chinese manuscripts dating from the 4th to the early 11th centuries. Another emerges from a deep study of the history of banned and forbidden books in China over the last 2000 years.

Xie’s concerns are as current as today’s headlines, touching on censorship, media manipulation and the control of facts and data. But in presenting his ideas, whether in the form of paintings, photographs or videos, Xie deliberately slows down the relentless pace of contemporary information. He celebrates the physical objects that contain our history and culture and asks us to pause and consider their vital place in a constantly changing world. His is a slow art in a fast world, putting beauty in the service of memory and history.

Today, Xiaoze Xie is an internationally recognized artist and the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. Xie received his Master of Fine Art degrees from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas. He has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally; his recent solo exhibitions include “Objects of Evidence” at the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2019-20) and “Eyes On” at the Denver Art Museum (2017-18). Xie’s work has garnered critical acclaim, his exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Artnews, and hyperallergic.com, among others. His work is in the permanent collection of such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Denver Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum of California. He is a recipient of the 2022 Asia Game Changer West Award from the Asia Society Northern California. Xie received the Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2013), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003), and artist awards from the Dallas Museum of Art and Phoenix Art Museum. Xie has published several exhibition catalogs as the subject and as a contributor. In 2016, a monograph of Xie’s work titled Xie Xiaoze: Artist Iconography was published by Xuelin Press in Shanghai.

About Writer

Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic, independent curator, journalist, and serves on the board of several not-for-profit art foundations and institutions. The primary focus of her practice centers on global contemporary art, in particular emerging artists and regions. Wei was born in Chengdu, China and has an MA in art history from Columbia University, New York.