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Maria Jole

Serreli

Roma 1975

Biography

Maria Jole Serreli is a painter, sculptor, fiber artist and performer, capable of expressing the different languages of contemporary art through a personal and always recognizable style. Her research is a search for attachments and connections: with nature, people, and objects that contain memory and become contemporary through her elaboration.
Born in Rome in 1975, she lives and works in Marrubiu, Sardinia. Her first solo exhibition dates back to 1999. In 2010 she won the scholarship “Workshow, creative laboratories on the net,” an artistic residency in San Sperate, at the International School of Sculpture: here she met Pinuccio Sciola, with whose memory and teaching she remains deeply connected. In 2015 she participated in the “Cosenza 2015 Art Residency” and founded The Art House Space in Marrubiu, her hometown, a home-atelier project, with the aim of creating a place dedicated to artistic exchange and sharing. For the past few years, she has been involved in a wide-ranging project of collaboration with some influential entities in China.
She has taken part in numerous exhibitions in established venues in Italy and abroad. Just to name a few: in Hamburg, an event promoted by the Sardinia Region, at the University of Pisa, at the Macro Testaccio in Rome, at the Art Moore House in London, at the Espace Le Marais in Paris, at the EXMA in Cagliari, the MURATS museum of Samugheo textile, the Eachway Faschion Group in Shenzhen China.
Maria Jole Serreli’s works are part of public collections, including the Dynamic Silk Museum of Mendicino, the Contemporary Art Museum Eachway Art and Fashion museum in Shenzhen, China, the Del Bosco Della Silla Museum, the Contemporary Art Limen Chamber of Commerce of Vibo Valentia, the BoCS Art Museum in Cosenza, the permanent collection and archive of the Belt and Road Ceramics Expo Center in Rongchang, in Chongqin district of China.

Critical text
“Maria Jole Serreli (Rome 1975) is a multidisciplinary artist who expresses her artistic vision through a plurality of languages, ranging from painting to sculpture, installation and performance. Her works are characterized by a strong relationship with the materials, often made of fabrics and objects, but also beginning from the reelaboration of texts and words in an unprecedented and intimate declination of visual poetry. Living and working in Sardinia, she has often been inspired by the archaic and traditional elements of her environment, translating it into an art that adopts the concept of domestic life and gives value to simple, everyday objects that awaken the memories that unite us with our most dear affections. Her works include old embroidered household fabrics, photographs, pieces of wood and leaves, old books, ancient cutlery and even real brushes, all assembled in a delicate and poetic composition, which recreates the sensation of the vital energy transmitted by Chinese art Gionghi, and encompasses the use of black ink, faded white carpets and the raw, organic texture of wood. These compositions are an invitation to meditation, and to an ethereal, harmonious and balanced world, which represents an interesting, original and timely message. Her works pay a tribute to our collective memory.
Among her most significant solo exhibitions is the exhibition-installation “At my house I had three chairs” , set up in 2020 at the EXMA in Cagliari, curated by me. At the end of the first and most shocking lockdown, in an immersive dimension of great impact and suggestion, the artist presented different groups of works, within environments inspired by the rooms of Marrubiu’s house-atelier, and profoundly characterized by the passage of female experiences. In such a delicate historical moment, which has upset the perception and relationship with spaces, “In my house I had three chairs” was able to present itself as an intense reflection, which probes deeply, on the idea of home as a multifaceted, inconsistent microcosm, in which people harbor affections and solitudes, rumors of friendships but also silent anxieties, regrets, defeats: a space of strong constraints and equally strong desires for emancipation, for the conquest of freedom.”
_Simona Campus