During this guided tour, C+N Gallery CANEPANERI is pleased to present "A Hyena Wore My Face Last Night", a duo exhibition curated by Joséphine-May Bailey, featuring new works by sculptor Holly Stevenson and painter Amelie Peace.

The exhibition takes its title from Leonora Carrington’s short story "The Debutante", in which a young woman enlists a hyena to attend a society ball in her place. Disguised in the skin of a maid it has devoured, the animal stumbles through the absurd rituals of aristocratic life with barely concealed contempt. The story is comic and macabre, absurd, and subversive. In this spirit, the exhibition explores femininity, transformation, concealment, and the blurred line between human and animal. Through ceramic sculpture and painting, Stevenson and Peace each consider the feminine as a space of doubling and becoming. Identity is presented not as something fixed, but as something provisional and shifting - something worn or borrowed, something that can be exchanged or undone.

C+N Gallery CANEPANERI has long been committed to experimental figurative practices, situating painting and sculpture in conversation with broader questions of myth, intimacy, and disguise. It is also a space of return for Amelie Peace, who first showed here in earlier exhibitions that introduced her atmospheric language of ambiguous gestures and charged interiors to Italian public. This new project situates her practice in dialogue with Stevenson’s ceramic sculpture, creating a conversation between surface and object, body and artefact, that draws its energy from Milan itself, a city where costume, theatre, and fashion saturate the cultural landscape, and where concealment and display are woven into everyday life.

Holly Stevenson’s new ceramics sharpen the exhibition’s relation to masks, relics, and the uncanny. "The most difficult thing was, how to disguise her face" (2025), a ceramic wall-based sculpture, resembles an LED beauty mask, the kind marketed for their promise of rejuvenation. Cat ears sprout from its smooth surface, introducing a note of feral absurdity that punctures the sleek language of self-care. The mask is no longer a neutral instrument of enhancement but a hybrid creature, somewhere between cosmetic technology and carnival disguise. Stevenson’s objects often move through the terrain of psychoanalysis, ritual, and performance. They are uncanny in Freud’s sense, at once familiar and estranged, hovering between relic and body, costume and artefact.