Sabrina Mezzaqui
13 Dec 2014 - 30 Jan 2015
Sabrina Mezzaqui
Il mantello della Regina delle Nevi, 2014
paper, pearls, thread
variable dimensions (h. 200 cm about)
Il mantello della Regina delle Nevi, 2014
paper, pearls, thread
variable dimensions (h. 200 cm about)
SABRINA MEZZAQUI
La saggezza della neve
13 December 2014 - 30 January 2015
Galleria Continua is pleased to host a new exhibition project by Sabrina Mezzaqui, La saggezza della neve (The Wisdom of Snow), in its San Gimignano gallery space.
Mezzaqui dwells on the more minute things of life, inviting us to abandon the culture of control and the continual search for security, in order to reappropriate for ourselves the possibility of experiencing wonder and amazement. “There are things that come along and we must just be capable of grasping them”, she explained in a recent interview. Consisting of repeated gestures and patient manual activity, her artistic practice is all about recovering the memory and image of the time that generated it. The privileged focus of her work is literature. The experience of reading, understood as a cognitive path, a process of maturing and as an inexhaustible source of knowledge, lies at the heart of the creative process. Simultaneously embracing different languages – figurative art and literature – the artist creates genuine visual poems where the written word and the image blend together harmoniously.
The main support employed by Mezzaqui is paper. “It is a material that we handle all the time (tickets, receipts, newspapers), and often we forget that actually it is very precious... using paper has an ambivalent meaning: it is a very fragile, precarious material, yet when handling it,” the artist sustains, “I savour its versatility, force and flexibility... Paper also has a symbolic value... a powerful sacrality. At the beginning it was the depository of the sacred texts. Even in the West the first printed book was the Bible...”
The artist works from home, at Marzabotto in the Bolognese hills. Sitting at a table, she cuts, etches, folds sheets of paper, weaves, threads, sticks fragments, fills the white space between lines, produces origami, thinks and converses. For many years now she has been accompanied by a working group who assist in the realization of her works, and with these people she shares her time and thoughts. “The design phase is solitary, the realization is done together with others... materially doing things together offers an opportunity to get to know others a lot,” says the artist.
The work Mezzaqui is presenting in the gallery’s tower space is entitled Il mantello della Regina delle Nevi (The Cloak of the Snow Queen). It is a long cloak con- sisting of a myriad of white paper flowers, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale: “a woman, who was dressed in the finest white gauze which looked as if it had been made from millions of starshaped flakes” (“The Snow Queen”). The Snow Queen is a restless, dangerous creature. For Andersen she is reason without feelings, ambition without the capacity to remember. Besides the fairy, there are two other female figures in the tale: Gerda, the good, simple and loyal girl, and the wild, unpredictable robber girl.
The artist has been working on Il mantello della Regina delle Nevi for about a year, together with around ten people. The work will be finished in the gallery on 13 December, together with the members of the Marzabotto working group. In an adjoining room a large table will be set up, with chairs, scissors, pins, strips of paper, beads, metal wire – all the materials used to make the cloak. Here the artist and her group of assistants, in their customary convivial manner, will busily complete the work over the course of a few hours.
Sabrina Mezzaqui was born in Bologna in 1964, and lives and works in Marzabotto. The artist has showed her work in many exhibitions in Italy and abroad, most recently: Krobylos, un groviglio di segni. Da Parmigianino a Kentridge, Palazzo del Podestà / Museo della Città, Rimini; Se di-segno, curated by S. Avveduti with I. Guzman, Padiglione Esprit Nouveau, Bologna; Bookhouse - La forma del libro, curated by A. Fiz, Marca, Catanzaro; Autoritratti. Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte italiana contemporanea, MAMbo, Bologna; Bestiario contemporaneo, curated by G. Testa and G. Verzotti, Museo di storia naturale, Venice; Andata e ricordo – There and Again – Souvenir de voyage, MART, Rovereto; Trame, curated by M. Minini, S. Raimondi and M. Zanchi, Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo; Maravee Anima, curated by S. Zannier, Castello di Susans, Majano, Udine; Tra-Edge of Becoming, curated by A. Vervoordt, D. Ferretti, R. Martinez and F. Poli, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice; Arte e Design - Vivere e pensare in carta e cartone, curated by P. Biscottini, Museo Diocesano, Milan; Cosa fa la mia anima mentre sto lavorando? Opere d’Arte Contemporanea dalla Collezione Consolandi, curated by F. Pasini and A. Vettese, MAGA, Gallarate; La scultura italiana del XXI secolo, curated by M. Meneguzzo, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan; Linguaggi e Sperimentazioni (Giovani artisti della collezione AGI, Verona), curated by G. Verzotti, MART, Rovereto (TN); Libri d’artista dalla collezione Consolandi 1919–2009, curated by G. Maffei and A. Vettese, Palazzo Reale, Milan. Solo shows include: Il bianco tra le parole, Chiesa di Santa Cristina, as part of the festival Ciò che ci rende umani, Teatro Valdoca, Cesena; SABRINA MEZZAQUI ‘Appello ai meditanti’, Piazza della Pilotta, Parma; Una forma di attenzione. In dialogo con Antonella Anedda, Galleria Passaggi, Pisa; Sabrina Mezzaqui, curated by A. Cestelli Guidi, in Libri come-Festa del libro e della lettura, Auditorium-Parco della Musica, Rome; The Dormancy of the Seed/La dormienza del seme, curated by G. Guglielmino, Bengal Art Lounge, Dhaka (Bangladesh); Forse noi siamo qui per dire: casa, ponte, fontana, brocca, albero da frutti, finestra, L’Ozio, Amsterdam; La realtà non è forte, Sala Gandini, Museo Civico d’Arte, Palazzo dei Musei, Modena; Equipaje de mano/Bagaglio a mano, Istituto Italiano di Cultura – MOCA, Buenos Aires; Come acqua nell’acqua, Castel Sant’Elmo, Naples; C’è un tempo, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin; Sabrina Mezzaqui, One Severn Street, Birmingham (GB).
Thanks to: Antonella Fiocchi, Jo Lolli, Debora Domenichelli, Rita Aldrovandi, Antonella Mazzetti, Claudio Faccioli, Stefano Muratori, Ferruccio Laffi, Grazia Bandini, Fabrizia Paulucci, Cinzia Corsi, Elisa Lavello, Francesca Papa, Cristina Navacchia, Patrizia Picchietti, Patrizia Izzo, Silke De Vivo, Chiara Neviani, Roberto Camatta, Paolo Carraro, Ruggero Pini.
La saggezza della neve
13 December 2014 - 30 January 2015
Galleria Continua is pleased to host a new exhibition project by Sabrina Mezzaqui, La saggezza della neve (The Wisdom of Snow), in its San Gimignano gallery space.
Mezzaqui dwells on the more minute things of life, inviting us to abandon the culture of control and the continual search for security, in order to reappropriate for ourselves the possibility of experiencing wonder and amazement. “There are things that come along and we must just be capable of grasping them”, she explained in a recent interview. Consisting of repeated gestures and patient manual activity, her artistic practice is all about recovering the memory and image of the time that generated it. The privileged focus of her work is literature. The experience of reading, understood as a cognitive path, a process of maturing and as an inexhaustible source of knowledge, lies at the heart of the creative process. Simultaneously embracing different languages – figurative art and literature – the artist creates genuine visual poems where the written word and the image blend together harmoniously.
The main support employed by Mezzaqui is paper. “It is a material that we handle all the time (tickets, receipts, newspapers), and often we forget that actually it is very precious... using paper has an ambivalent meaning: it is a very fragile, precarious material, yet when handling it,” the artist sustains, “I savour its versatility, force and flexibility... Paper also has a symbolic value... a powerful sacrality. At the beginning it was the depository of the sacred texts. Even in the West the first printed book was the Bible...”
The artist works from home, at Marzabotto in the Bolognese hills. Sitting at a table, she cuts, etches, folds sheets of paper, weaves, threads, sticks fragments, fills the white space between lines, produces origami, thinks and converses. For many years now she has been accompanied by a working group who assist in the realization of her works, and with these people she shares her time and thoughts. “The design phase is solitary, the realization is done together with others... materially doing things together offers an opportunity to get to know others a lot,” says the artist.
The work Mezzaqui is presenting in the gallery’s tower space is entitled Il mantello della Regina delle Nevi (The Cloak of the Snow Queen). It is a long cloak con- sisting of a myriad of white paper flowers, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale: “a woman, who was dressed in the finest white gauze which looked as if it had been made from millions of starshaped flakes” (“The Snow Queen”). The Snow Queen is a restless, dangerous creature. For Andersen she is reason without feelings, ambition without the capacity to remember. Besides the fairy, there are two other female figures in the tale: Gerda, the good, simple and loyal girl, and the wild, unpredictable robber girl.
The artist has been working on Il mantello della Regina delle Nevi for about a year, together with around ten people. The work will be finished in the gallery on 13 December, together with the members of the Marzabotto working group. In an adjoining room a large table will be set up, with chairs, scissors, pins, strips of paper, beads, metal wire – all the materials used to make the cloak. Here the artist and her group of assistants, in their customary convivial manner, will busily complete the work over the course of a few hours.
Sabrina Mezzaqui was born in Bologna in 1964, and lives and works in Marzabotto. The artist has showed her work in many exhibitions in Italy and abroad, most recently: Krobylos, un groviglio di segni. Da Parmigianino a Kentridge, Palazzo del Podestà / Museo della Città, Rimini; Se di-segno, curated by S. Avveduti with I. Guzman, Padiglione Esprit Nouveau, Bologna; Bookhouse - La forma del libro, curated by A. Fiz, Marca, Catanzaro; Autoritratti. Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte italiana contemporanea, MAMbo, Bologna; Bestiario contemporaneo, curated by G. Testa and G. Verzotti, Museo di storia naturale, Venice; Andata e ricordo – There and Again – Souvenir de voyage, MART, Rovereto; Trame, curated by M. Minini, S. Raimondi and M. Zanchi, Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo; Maravee Anima, curated by S. Zannier, Castello di Susans, Majano, Udine; Tra-Edge of Becoming, curated by A. Vervoordt, D. Ferretti, R. Martinez and F. Poli, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice; Arte e Design - Vivere e pensare in carta e cartone, curated by P. Biscottini, Museo Diocesano, Milan; Cosa fa la mia anima mentre sto lavorando? Opere d’Arte Contemporanea dalla Collezione Consolandi, curated by F. Pasini and A. Vettese, MAGA, Gallarate; La scultura italiana del XXI secolo, curated by M. Meneguzzo, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan; Linguaggi e Sperimentazioni (Giovani artisti della collezione AGI, Verona), curated by G. Verzotti, MART, Rovereto (TN); Libri d’artista dalla collezione Consolandi 1919–2009, curated by G. Maffei and A. Vettese, Palazzo Reale, Milan. Solo shows include: Il bianco tra le parole, Chiesa di Santa Cristina, as part of the festival Ciò che ci rende umani, Teatro Valdoca, Cesena; SABRINA MEZZAQUI ‘Appello ai meditanti’, Piazza della Pilotta, Parma; Una forma di attenzione. In dialogo con Antonella Anedda, Galleria Passaggi, Pisa; Sabrina Mezzaqui, curated by A. Cestelli Guidi, in Libri come-Festa del libro e della lettura, Auditorium-Parco della Musica, Rome; The Dormancy of the Seed/La dormienza del seme, curated by G. Guglielmino, Bengal Art Lounge, Dhaka (Bangladesh); Forse noi siamo qui per dire: casa, ponte, fontana, brocca, albero da frutti, finestra, L’Ozio, Amsterdam; La realtà non è forte, Sala Gandini, Museo Civico d’Arte, Palazzo dei Musei, Modena; Equipaje de mano/Bagaglio a mano, Istituto Italiano di Cultura – MOCA, Buenos Aires; Come acqua nell’acqua, Castel Sant’Elmo, Naples; C’è un tempo, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin; Sabrina Mezzaqui, One Severn Street, Birmingham (GB).
Thanks to: Antonella Fiocchi, Jo Lolli, Debora Domenichelli, Rita Aldrovandi, Antonella Mazzetti, Claudio Faccioli, Stefano Muratori, Ferruccio Laffi, Grazia Bandini, Fabrizia Paulucci, Cinzia Corsi, Elisa Lavello, Francesca Papa, Cristina Navacchia, Patrizia Picchietti, Patrizia Izzo, Silke De Vivo, Chiara Neviani, Roberto Camatta, Paolo Carraro, Ruggero Pini.