Aniela Preston's Surrealist Paintings Open L.U.P.O.'s New Milan Space

Galleria L.U.P.O., founded in 2021 by Massimiliano Lorenzelli, has inaugurated a new venue in Milan's Isola district at Via Borsieri 29. The space, still under renovation, previously hosted its first exhibition in April 2025—a dual show curated by Sole Castelbarco Albani titled Nowhere to Be and Too Sweet to Last. Now, the gallery presents Who wouldn’t love to live in a fantasy, the second solo exhibition by British artist Aniela Preston (born 1988), following Cheaper than therapy in February 2024. Preston's paintings draw on Western figurative traditions from the Middle Ages to Mannerism, reworked through a contemporary lens. Her new series, which she calls Capriccios, depicts imaginary spaces that abandon rationality for emotional and unconscious logic. Executed primarily in acrylic, the works combine technical hyperrealism with symbolic density, transforming intimate scenes into allegories of the Anthropocene, vulnerability, and control. The palette is seductive, but beneath the apparent harmony lies latent unease: beauty becomes tense, fantasy reveals itself as an unstable territory where reverence and power, enchantment and violence coexist. Preston critiques a civilization that aestheticizes nature while accelerating its disappearance. The exhibition uses fantasy as a critical device, inviting reflection on whether imagination is a refuge or a symptom of a world disconnected from its own consequences.