Frieze New York

Lodovico Corsini is pleased to present a two-person exhibition for Frieze New York 2025, featuring works by New York-based artist Francesca Facciola and German artist Peter Wächtler. Bringing together references to canonical narratives, psychological questionings, and the uncanny, the works create a dialogue between the two artists’ distinctive practices.

Storytelling is central to Peter Wächtler’s practice, using illustration and sculpture to depict unsettling yet somehow familiar scenarios, which mirror deeper psychological preoccupations and societal undercurrents. Here, a series of previously unexhibited glazed ceramic works depict life-sized snakes, their seductive and bulging bodies bordering on repulsion. One cannot help but think about the ultimate biblical narrative of Eve and the serpent, a story of mankind’s downfall and ever-present corruptibility or fallibility. Potent with symbolism, the sculptures gesture toward the slipperiness of meaning itself, offering instead a winding narrative, where humour and unease intertwine. 

An oil on canvas painting depicting a bundle of sticks furthers this approach: spare, quiet, and enigmatic, the work suggests latent animation, as though the sticks might spring to life at any moment and writhe off the canvas. This rustic scene feels familiar, like the spectre of a fairytale or fable, told and retold to the point of abstraction. Combining craft, absurdity, and a deep ambivalence, the artist uses such visual tropes to produce scenes onto viewers are invited to project their own narrative, shaped by individual and collective experiences.

Francesca Facciola’s work betrays the complexities of the collective psyche by employing and upending archetypes and mythologies. Here, a selection of new oil paintings and charcoal drawings produced as part of a sprawling series entitled “F is for fun” unfold her practice, burgeoning on the frontiers of technical mastery and a hallucinatory visual vocabulary.

A recurrent motif in many of the works presented is an articulated doll reminiscent of a painter’s wooden manikin, meticulously rendered, suggesting both a surrogate self and a vessel for projection. The body is indeed a key element in the artist’s oeuvre, as Facciola often stages and documents scenes with props, performers, and costumes before engaging in the act of painting. This preparatory method informs her compositions, where a hyperreal rendering in turn evokes the high gloss of screens and the aesthetics of digital culture. Yet, her paintings counter their virtuality and assert their objecthood, whether through canvases shaped like a painter’s palette or encased in padded leather frames that recall smartphone screens or domestic upholstery.

Feeding off the clichés and tropes of foundational tales (from the Iliad to Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, and biblical episodes), Facciola destabilises mythic structures to reveal their psychological underpinnings. Gesturing towards sources as broad as anime and speculative fiction, her compositions layer meaning through hyper-montage—an intuitive mode of image construction that mirrors the nonlinear workings of the unconscious mind that so deeply fascinates her. 

Wächtler and Facciola offer works that are as psychologically charged as they are formally inventive. Through humour, ambiguity, and rigorous material commitment, the artists invite viewers into narrative spaces where meaning shifts, fractures, and reforms incessantly.