Domingo Milella

Print 180 x 225 cm. 70 7/8 x 88 5/8 in.

Frame 186.5 x 231.5 cm. 73 3/8 x 91 1/8 in.

Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

Directly from the artist studio

Sotheby's Maison, Hong Kong, Domingo Milella LIMINAL, 10 June – 20 August 2026

Epigravettian (circa 20,000–13,000 years ago)

The Cala dei Genovesi cave (Levanzo, Sicily) houses a collection of engravings made at the end of the Ice Age and black paintings executed several millennia later, already in the Holocene, the current climatic era. The creators of the latter, members of farming communities, developed a form of rock art very different from that of Paleolithic hunters: different societies, different arts. Now, the human figure becomes the central motif of the decorated panels, reduced to a few straight or curved lines that create highly standardized, simple, and static outlines. Only one decorated panel in the cave breaks this pattern. Here appears a red anthropomorphic figure of greater compositional complexity and endowed with a certain dynamism that lends it greater expressiveness. Located in a recess that sets it apart, it is associated with other red figures and a quadruped with a rounded body and very short legs, probably a doe. Neither one nor the other fits the “canon” of Neolithic schematic art. This opens up the possibility that they were created in a physical and symbolic world still shaped by the final throes of the Ice Age.