Renata Prunas_Materia Risorta

Of Sardinian origin, Prunas first studied music in Naples, where she became acquainted with the vibrant cultural milieu surrounding the journal “Sud,” founded by her brother Pasquale and featuring, among others, writers such as Anna Maria Ortese and Raffaele La Capria. She began exhibiting in Rome in the early 1970s, where she met Mirella Bentivoglio, who facilitated her participation in several landmark exhibitions focused on women’s art, including Segno e Identità: ipotesi – Itinerario dentro la creatività femminile (Ravenna, 1977), Filo, Genesi, Filogenesi (Cagliari, 1980), and Filo-logia (Rome, 1981).

Seeking to rescue everyday objects from their inevitable fate of consumption and disposal, Prunas explores the relationship between matter, memory, and identity, constructing true visual alphabets in which forms and materials acquire new meanings.

The exhibition presents a selection of Prunas’s principal series, beginning with cork, a material connected to her Sardinian origins. Her compositions of bottle corks, arranged in vibrant fields of colour and inspired by Mark Rothko and Salvatore Emblema, are visual transpositions of musical scores with a powerful perceptual impact.

From 1975 onwards, she began working with tights, her material of choice, which she used in the women-only group exhibitions curated by Bentivoglio and focused on the relationship between weaving and verbal language. While the tears and tensions within the transparent fabric evoke the investigations of Spatialism, they also introduce a feminine, erotic, and personal symbolism, thanks to the tights’ ability to preserve the imprint of the body they once contained.

More recently, Prunas has developed her practice of assemblage, in which her poetics of giving value to discarded materials reaches full maturity. Objects taken from the artist’s domestic environment are transformed, often with the help of written words. The exhibition culminates, in a sense, with My MoMA (2024), a miniature museum inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, in which Prunas gathers her own work in reduced scale, humorously staging her peripheral relationship with the art system.