Elisabetta Gut
_Alphabets
Curated by Paolo Cortese and Rosanna Ruscio
This is the first retrospective dedicated to the Italian-Swiss artist, who recently passed away in 2024. Aiming to document the artistic journey of Elisabetta Gut, retracing its various phases from the early 1960s onwards – spanning a period of sixty years – the exhibition will feature 70 works, including paintings, collages, sculptures, and book-objects.
Born in Rome in 1934 from an Italian mother and a Swiss-German father, Gut spent several years in Switzerland during World War II before returning to Italy after the end of the conflict in 1945. In Rome, she attended the Institute of Art and the Course of Nude Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, displaying a strong sense of space and color. At just over twenty years old, in 1956, she held her first solo exhibition at the Cairola Gallery in Milan, presented by Felice Casorati.
After an initial figurative and post-Cubist phase, her research shifted towards something more informal. The current exhibition in Athens follows this evolution, beginning with the multi material works of the early 1960s. These include large, mainly monochrome white canvases, where objects connected to memory emerge, that the artist recovers and organises in a dreamlike and timeless, but at the same time, very material dimension.
By the mid-1970s, Gut had created a series of sculptures in perspex, crafted with meticulous precision, an almost obsessive attention to detail that would become a distinctive characteristic of her work. The 1970s were undoubtedly a particularly intense period for the artist, during which she also developed some of her important series such as Fughe and Aquiloni. These are large-scale collages in wood and perspex with a constructivist influence, where geometric, two-dimensional elements are contrasted in order to create a rhythmic composition of solids and voids, black and white.
Towards the late 1970s, Gut became involved with Visual Poetry, developing distinctive poetics that would define her work from that point on. Music, nature, and poetry were her main sources of inspiration, from which she drew elements that she reworked based on a personal system of codes with fantastical alphabets that, despite their imaginative nature, followed strict and rigorous rules.
Leaves, flowers, seeds, and fragments of oriental, Arabic, or musical writings are filling her Fabriano A4 sheets. These compositions, called Poetry Pages, along with her book-objects, such as Book-Leaf, Book-Seed, Book-Nest, and Caged Book – and her Poem-Objects, sculptural books inspired by Futurism – form the stylistic signature for which Gut was most recognised.
Her work has been exhibited in prestigious international events, including the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale, and in recent years, her solo exhibitions have been hosted at the NMWA (National Museum of Women Arts) in Washington (USA) and the MRAG in Maitland (Australia).
Many of her works are now part of the permanent exhibition in major institutions in Italy and abroad, including Museion in Bolzano, MART in Trento and Rovereto, MAGA in Gallarate, MRAG in Maitland (Australia), and NMWA in Washington (USA).
Among the many distinguished art critics who have written about her work are M. Bentivoglio, E. Crispolti, F. Menna, N. Ponente, A. Spatola, L. Trucchi, L. Vergine, C. Vivaldi, K. Wasserman, and F. Zoccoli.
The exhibition, sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute of Athens, is part of the Le ragazze di Mirella project, which Gramma_Epsilon Gallery dedicates to Mirella Bentivoglio and the artists she supported. It will be accompanied by a bilingual Italian-English catalogue curated by Paolo Cortese and Rosanna Ruscio, with contributions by Paolo Cortese, Rosanna Ruscio, and Tommaso Silvestrini.
