From Tuesday 27 September to Friday 7 October 2022 at the Basilica of San Celso opens to the public Kill Your Idols , the first exhibition in Milan of the artist Radek Szlaga (Gliwice, 1979), one of the leading voices of the contemporary Polish art scene. The exhibition is promoted by the PostmastersROMA gallery with the patronage of the Polish Institute of Rome and the collaboration of the LAQ - lartquotidien association, and is accompanied by a critical text by Giovanna Manzotti.

Trained between Poland and the United States, Radek Szlaga is a multidisciplinary artist who expresses himself through painting, drawing, sculpture and installation , acting as a mediator of a particular dialogue between traditional artistic languages and more contemporary perspectives. His works, characterized by a dense stratification of colors, materials, designs and iconographies , are the manifestation of a personal as well as collective imagination built over the years by assimilating iconic and evocative elements drawn from popular culture, history, politics and the mass media. .

For the Kill Your Idols exhibition, designed specifically for the spaces of the Basilica of San Celso , Szlaga presents Noriega Mix Tapes, an unpublished series of works - 13 paintings and a sculpture - inspired by a historical fact bordering on the absurd, of which it collects the most anecdotal and humorous aspects, filtering them through their own stylistic code.

In 1989, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega escaped the American invasion by taking refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama. To capture him, the command of the US military chose to adopt an unconventional method: he deployed a dozen amplifiers outside the embassy to track down the dictator, a great opera lover, to the sound of heavy metal music. Songs like Metallica's Enter Sandman, Guns N 'Roses' Welcome to the Jungle, or Black Sabbath's Paranoid rang out for days until exhausted Noriega surrendered to US forces.