For Ad Minoliti, metaphysical painting is the symbol of the modernist utopia and of everything that she found reproachable in it: the repressiveness of its ideality, the conservatism of its rigid structures, and even its implicit binary logic, in reference to Jacques Derrida’s idea that Western thinking is founded upon dualistic oppositions such as male-female, rational-emotional, or nature-culture. Her artistic endeavour has been to create an alternative space of representation to counter this modernist stance. She found a dialectical alter-homologue of the space of metaphysical painting in the imaginary world of the dollhouse. A 17th-century invention, the dollhouse was initially created as a pedagogic tool to instruct girls on their roles as home-makers, house-managers, children-bearers, and husband-supporters – and boys on the acceptance of this labour division and philosophy. Minoliti appropriates the aesthetic of the dollhouse and its props, compounds it with modernist imagery that echoes Kandinsky, Picasso, or Matisse, and then takes it apart, twists it, shifts it, and reconfigures it afresh.
