The exhibition Books As Art. I libri, Le artistewill be presented on Thursday 5 December, at 18.00, in the presence of Rector Francesco Mola. It will be the third installment of a multi-year project promoted by MUACC, in collaboration with Gramma_Epsilon Gallery, Athens. The overarching mission of the project is focused on ‘restoring’ women’s artistic research back into the cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Research that has been pushed to the margins of the cultural system for centuries, yet now sits in a context that has become essential to the international field of art studies and to the current historical-critical debate.
After the two previous solo exhibitions dedicated to Franca Sonnino and Francesca Cataldi, Books As Art. I libri, Le artistenow focuses on a large group exhibition in which seventy works, by more than fifty artists, are presented in book form. The book is, in fact, of key importance in women’s artistic research starting with the groundbreaking exhibition ‘The Materialization of Language’, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio in the context of the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978. In this exhibition and during the numerous initiatives curated in the 1980s and 1990s, Mirella Bentivoglio developed her terminology that became central to her entire aesthetic approach: the form and meaning of the book unite two realms, that of Logos, language, and that of Mater, matter. Two opposing but complementary worlds that merge into singular, communicative, and at times, silent poetic testimonies. Where Mater also encapsulates, etymologically, the need to assert an anti-rhetorical idea of motherhood and femininity.
Books as Art was first shown at Gramma_Epsilon in Athens in 2023, and now introduced as an extended and renewed version, specifically designed for the University Museum of Cagliari. For each of the two exhibition events, Maria Jole Serreli developed two new performances: the performance designed for the Cagliari edition accompanied the preview of the show as part of the Pazza Idea Festival.
Books as Art will be compiled into a single catalogue, published in both English and Italian.
Artists:
Marilla Battilana, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Anna Boschi, Francesca Cataldi, Betty Danon, Chiara Diamantini, Neide Dias de Sá, Lia Drei, Anna Esposito, Fernanda Fedi, Ileana Florescu, Coco Gordon, Elisabetta Gut, Marianna Karava, Susanne Kessler, Maria Lai, Rosanna Lancia, Liliana Landi, Ketty La Rocca, Carolina Lombardi, Virginia Lorenzetti, Sara Lovari, Lucia Marcucci, Gisella Meo, Patrizia Molinari, Aurèlia Muñoz, Elly Nagaoka, Riri Negri, Francesca Nicchi, Giulia Niccolai, Antonietta Orsatti, Luana Perilli, Astra Papachristodoulou, Renata Prunas, Betty Radin, Franca Rovigatti, Anna Maria Sacconi, Giovanna Sandri, Alba Savoi, Marilena Scavizzi, Evelina Schatz, Greta Schödl, Maria Jole Serreli, Franca Sonnino, Giulia Spernazza, Chima Sunada, Dora Tass, Salette Tavares, Anna Torelli, Anna Uncini.
Opening MUACC University Museum of Contemporary Arts and Cultures Thursday 05 December – at 18.00
Antonietta Orsatti: “This is my story, it wasn’t all roses”
LETTERA_E Rome (Italy)
Curated by Paolo Cortese
On Saturday 12 October Antonietta Orsatti’s solo exhibition ‘This is my story, it wasn’t all roses’, curated by Paolo Cortese and presented by Alfredo Accatino, will be inaugurated at the independent space Lettera_E in Rome – in collaboration with Gramma_Epsilon Gallery.
In light of the upcoming exhibition, we introduce you to this ‘outsider’ female artist with a strong and rich production since the 1960s. She began her artistic journey at an early age and studied ceramics at the Art Institute in Chieti where she was taught by Tommaso Cascella. She continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and She graduated in sculpture in 1967. In the same year, she married and returned permanently to Abruzzo, where she taught drawing and art history in high schools. Since the 1970s, she has carried out her artistic research in solitude, thus almost withdrawing from exhibitions.
This will be the Abruzzese artist’s first solo exhibition in Rome. More than 30 works will be on display, including two-dimensional works, sketchbooks, terracotta sculptures, cardboards and chalked fabrics.
Curated by Simona Campus and Paolo Cortese
The exhibition CARNET DE MON VOYAGE traces Francesca Cataldi’s artistic journey, presenting a reading and re-interpretation of her work, as an unfolding narrative consisting of many tales. An ‘unconventional’ library of heterodox, hybrid books, born out of the collision and mutual acceptance and appreciation of different elements, and of the many materials that the artist chooses to experiment with, unfolds and organises itself along the exhibition itinerary.
CARNET DE MON VOYAGE is the result of a collaboration between the MUACC and Gramma_Epsilon Gallery in Athens, marking another milestone in a shared commitment to research, study and appreciation of work by female artists who have contributed significantly to the innovation of contemporary Italian art history.
@MUACC
Museo universitario delle arti
e delle culture contemporanee
06.06.2024 – 13.09.2024
Via Santa Croce, 63
Cagliari (Italy)
info: muacc.info@unica.it
+39 070 675 5330
Curated by Sofia Gotti and Caterina Iaquinta
The 20th Women’s Biennial in Ferrara, to which Gramma_Epsilon had the honour to contribute with the loan of 3 works by Amalia Etlinger, an artist very close to Mirella Bentivoglio and to whom they are also dedicated.
Biennale Donna, a historic event dedicated to contemporary female creativity promoted by UDI – Unione Donne in Italia (Women’s Union in Italy), this year marks its twentieth edition.
From 14 April to 30 June 2024 Palazzo Bonacossi in Ferrara will host Yours in Solidarity – Altre Storie tra Arte e Parola (Other Stories between Art and Words) curated by Sofia Gotti and Caterina Iaquinta, an exhibition bringing together installations, sculptures, performances and textile works created by six international women artists: Binta Diaw, Amelia Etlinger, Bracha L. Ettinger, Sara Leghissa, Muna Mussie and Nicoline van Harskamp.
The project sets out to highlight some of the aspects that have characterised the Ferrara event since its inception and at the same time to enhance its national visibility. The driving concept is to continue to bring women artists to the fore “from the background” while also presenting “a new arsenal of voices” ready to advocate for the need to rethink women’s presence within a world that has become increasingly complex and polarised. Alongside the artists’ works, a valuable selection of historical materials from UDI will be showcased, including archival documents, catalogues, leaflets, banners and photographs, retracing the Biennale’s milestones and evolution.
Curated by Sonia D’Alto, organized by the BTS Como Arte Foundation.
The exhibition is dedicated to the figure of Pliny the Elder, a source of inspiration for many contemporary artists, 2000 years after his birth.
Alongside works by international artists there will be finds from the Paolo Giovio Civic Archaeological Museum in Como, the Natural History Museum of Milan and the Museum of Roman Civilizations as well as precious prints from the Bertarelli Civic Collection of Castello Sforzesco.
Mirella Bentivoglio is included in this singular journey between contemporary art and natural history with 3 works: Le Tavole del Sapere, book-object from 1992, Book with Egg, from 1990, and From Egg to Zero, from 1984.
“It is a short space that suggests infinity”: with these words Jean Grenier defines the Mediterranean. With its problems and its myriad resources, the Mediterranean stands there to remind us of the challenges we face and the need for the salvation of the planet through the realization that everyone’s contribution is needed.
Precisely because of this, it would be useful to think for the Medina Biennial (Malta) the women artists who saw the Mediterranean as a metaphor for a paradigm shift, the possibility of evoking a rebirth. The fact that these are women artists is not to be overlooked, especially since the theme of the Mediterranean in the years between the 1970s and 1990s, the years when most of these women artists were very active, seemed to have marginal aesthetic potential. The themes addressed in their works are borders, plots and warps, as a metaphor for life, an allegory on the idea of travel, exchange and memory. These are artworks by Goddesses who lost and found the perenniality of the theme, of Goddesses rediscovered as evidence of a current discours.
Artists Mirella Bentivoglio, Francesca Cataldi, Chiara Diamantini, Elisabetta Gut, Gisella Meo, Maria Jole Serreli, Greta Schödl, and Franca Sonnino
Non-profit cultural organization Artefact Athens presents The Butterfly Effect, a contemporary art exhibition curated by Kostas Prapoglou, which will take place in numerous spaces of the prominent textile industry “Butterfly Threads – Mouzakis”. The conceptual framework of the curatorial practice of this exhibition involves a poetic and allegorical metaphor of the butterfly effect that lends its name to the title. Curator Kostas Prapoglou invites 41 contemporary artists to present works that will respond to this unique space (site-specific) and context, creating with their visual, multidisciplinary vocabulary, installations, video, sculptures and painting.
Gramma_Epsilon Gallery participates through a site-specific installation of two Italian women fiber artists of different generations: Franca Sonnino and Maria Jole Serreli. Through a grandiose cocoon-installation, made by Serreli, which embraces Sonnino’s textile piece, the project highlights the dialogical relation between intergenerational and collective narratives of fiber art in relation to the space and the history of the Athenian factory.
In the temporary exhibition titled ‘Franca Sonnino / Gabetti & Isola’, design gallery Jochum Rodgers presents works by Franca Sonnino (born in 1932): the emblematic Rome-based fiber artist who rebuilds the world with a skein of iron wire and a few spools of cotton thread. Together with her works, the exhibition also displays furniture pieces by designers and architects Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola. The architectural duo opened its studio in Turin in 1950 and it soon became one of the most remarkable professional collaborations in the international design world.
Artists Franca Sonnino, Roberto Gabretti e Aimaro Isola