Marilena
Scavizzi
Biography
A multifaceted artist, she graduated in Law, attended New York University and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia where she has taught engraving and graphics since 1983. She develops her own research on color and engraving and since the end of the 80s she has extended her research to fabric, tapestries and ceramics, inspired by the encyclopedic treasure of tales, myths, fairy tales and superstition, where personal experience merges and collective memory. It is precisely from experimenting with the use of wooden and linoleum matrices created for printing on paper that her journey begins: the search for soft effects, apparently in contrast with the rigidity of the slabs, was the challenge the artist undertook to “eliminate something too rigid and scholastic”. Over the years, Scavizzi has experimented with different techniques, tools and supports, obtaining surprising results; particularly interesting are her tapestries which interpret an instrument as ancient as the loom in a contemporary and original way.
Critical text
“Both mythical and poetic, the weaving technique in the art of Marilena Scavizzi is expressed in the form of a textual fabric and thus becomes narration.
The artist sews together threads and fabrics in order to give shape to placeless worlds; and to narrate stories that exist beyond chronology since they are born in our heads and are found in the depth of our most intimate tales.
The art of Marilena Scavizzi creates new places and temporalities that Michel Foucault would call heterotopias and heterochronies.”
_Cesare Coppari
