The material life

Eight Rooms, Eight Stories

Chiara Camoni, Alice Cattaneo, Elena El Asmar, Serena Fineschi, Ludovica Gioscia, Loredana Longo, Claudia Losi, Sabrina Mezzaqui

This exhibition inaugurates a new season of contemporary art at the Palazzo Magnani Foundation, presenting the work of eight Italian artists – Chiara Camoni, Alice Cattaneo, Elena El Asmar, Serena Fineschi, Ludovica Gioscia, Loredana Longo, Claudia Losi and Sabrina Mezzaqui – who are united in their use and regeneration of what are often humble materials traditionally associated with crafts, but which find an original place in their art.

The show also offers interesting connections with the concurrent retrospective dedicated to Jean Dubuffet at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia.

The project springs from the desire to promote the work of female artists whose art is skilfully linked to personal experience and to the union of art and life in all its complexity and fecundity.

The viewer is invited to discover eight habitats, eight environments, named by their respective creators. Rooms like cocoons, where each artist has proposed her own world, her work in the studio, clearly showing how the processes of transforming materials engender something organic and vital. The environments are presented confidently, in a way that neither distances nor intimidates visitors but instead encourages them to venture into the game of discovery.

The exhibition involves and interrogates the senses, particularly vision and touch, because experience passes through our bodies, which in turn create synaesthesia with their surroundings. It is a body-world, which is why the exhibition opens with the tree of the body as perceived and presented by Claudia Losi, and with a velarium on a landscape-body, staged by Elena El Asmar, which together form an engaging prologue to the eight rooms.