Gena
Milanesi
Gena Milanesi
July-Sep 2026
/ Current resident
Gena Milanesi is a Scottish-American artist who works primarily in painting and drawing. Born in Los Angeles, Milanesi was raised between Santa Monica and Glasgow. In 2025, she received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. Her work investigates painting as an active encounter: a living site of perception where sensation unfolds through the life of the surface. Milanesi creates paintings that develop through accumulation, disruption, and revision. Her practice explores the potential of material, treating the surface as a reflective force field in which forms move through a continual dialogue of emergence and disappearance. Drawing from the history of painting, cinema, and the overlooked rhythms of everyday life, she absorbes these influences into the work. In quiet tension with contemporary image culture, the work insists on the value of duration. Her paintings reveal their own becoming as force gives way to tenderness and structure yields to improvisation. The meaning emerges through the visible history of the surface.
"Painting is a means of reification, of giving form to what resists form, and making felt what defies articulation. I am interested in making honest paintings that reveal their own making, where every mark exposes a decision and the hand remains present as proof of touch, time, a body moving through material. To make this work in New York is a dream come true. I am excited to absorb the city’s relentless rhythm and allow its momentum to become part of the lively negotiation that shapes my practice."
Gena Milanesi
Gena Milanesi
Gena Milanesi
July-Sep 2026
/ Current resident
Gena Milanesi is a Scottish-American artist who works primarily in painting and drawing. Born in Los Angeles, Milanesi was raised between Santa Monica and Glasgow. In 2025, she received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. Her work investigates painting as an active encounter: a living site of perception where sensation unfolds through the life of the surface. Milanesi creates paintings that develop through accumulation, disruption, and revision. Her practice explores the potential of material, treating the surface as a reflective force field in which forms move through a continual dialogue of emergence and disappearance. Drawing from the history of painting, cinema, and the overlooked rhythms of everyday life, she absorbes these influences into the work. In quiet tension with contemporary image culture, the work insists on the value of duration. Her paintings reveal their own becoming as force gives way to tenderness and structure yields to improvisation. The meaning emerges through the visible history of the surface.
"Painting is a means of reification, of giving form to what resists form, and making felt what defies articulation. I am interested in making honest paintings that reveal their own making, where every mark exposes a decision and the hand remains present as proof of touch, time, a body moving through material. To make this work in New York is a dream come true. I am excited to absorb the city’s relentless rhythm and allow its momentum to become part of the lively negotiation that shapes my practice."
Gena Milanesi
Gena
Milanesi
Gena Milanesi
July-Sep 2026
/ Current resident
Gena Milanesi is a Scottish-American artist who works primarily in painting and drawing. Born in Los Angeles, Milanesi was raised between Santa Monica and Glasgow. In 2025, she received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. Her work investigates painting as an active encounter: a living site of perception where sensation unfolds through the life of the surface. Milanesi creates paintings that develop through accumulation, disruption, and revision. Her practice explores the potential of material, treating the surface as a reflective force field in which forms move through a continual dialogue of emergence and disappearance. Drawing from the history of painting, cinema, and the overlooked rhythms of everyday life, she absorbes these influences into the work. In quiet tension with contemporary image culture, the work insists on the value of duration. Her paintings reveal their own becoming as force gives way to tenderness and structure yields to improvisation. The meaning emerges through the visible history of the surface.
"Painting is a means of reification, of giving form to what resists form, and making felt what defies articulation. I am interested in making honest paintings that reveal their own making, where every mark exposes a decision and the hand remains present as proof of touch, time, a body moving through material. To make this work in New York is a dream come true. I am excited to absorb the city’s relentless rhythm and allow its momentum to become part of the lively negotiation that shapes my practice."