For her first solo present at an Italian artwork establishment, Giulia Andreani is presenting “L’improduttiva,” a undertaking that incorporates a cohesive physique of latest work, with large-scale work and watercolours, conceived for the South Room of Collezione Maramotti.

Andreani’s work grows out of collective recollections, fragments of historical past liable to being misplaced, which the artist recovers and transforms into advanced pictorial compositions, visible collages constructed by means of correspondences.

Archives, and the pre-digital objects they maintain, are her major supply of inspiration: light letters, yellowed paperwork, and above all, black-and white-photographs that the artist selects, gathers and filters in a non-linear manner, sifting out their key components.
Andreani’s work is guided by an unorthodox method to analysis, by which pictures of the previous are absorbed and reworked by her inventive subjectivity. It reveals invisible figures and forgotten information, locations, and moments, most of that are indissolubly linked to the historic, social and cultural expertise of the feminine gender. In a lot of her works, Andreani—who calls herself a feminist painter/researcher—raises questions on how ladies have been seen and represented in numerous eras, stating the underlying energy dynamics and dismantling gender stereotypes.
Her apply of “portray with pictures” is fuelled by a mix of latent tensions and figures from the previous, introduced again to life as sentinels of the current.

The figures summoned onto her canvases, with settings and titles that put them into surreal contexts, current the viewer not solely with a sequence of effigies, however with a brand new, disturbing take a look at Historical past.

Remodeling the strategy of photomontage into her personal type of painterly expression, Andreani juxtaposes components drawn from actual footage with different, imaginary particulars, melding them collectively as a brand new iconographic complete.
The topics steadily take form on the canvas because the artist applies skinny layers of a single color: Payne’s gray, a bluish tone suggestive of some distant twilight, evoking previous moments of visible expertise that vary from cyanotypes to classic prints.

The conceptual start line for “L’improduttiva” was iconographic materials from a number of archives in Reggio Emilia, the place Andreani investigated the historic and sociopolitical context of the town, focusing specifically on the concepts of inside exile and imprisonment, so intently tied to ladies’s historical past. She explored components from the World Battle II period by means of paperwork held by Biblioteca Panizzi and by ISTORECO (Institute for the Research of the Resistence and Modern Society). Supplies from a personal archive and from the Biblioteca Scientifica Carlo Livi allowed the artist to delve into the previous psychiatric hospital of San Lazzaro; the hidden lives of its inmates, from the late nineteenth century to the Nineteen Seventies, are introduced again into historical past by means of a sequence of seven portraits (Seven Saints).

The primary work that Andreani made for this undertaking, which considerably lends its title (L’improduttiva, “The Unproductive One”) to your entire exhibition, was impressed by a photograph from the early Forties. It reveals feminine college students on the tailoring college established in Reggio Emilia by Giulia Maramotti, mom of the founding father of Max Mara—the corporate initially headquartered within the constructing on Through Fratelli Cervi that now homes Collezione Maramotti.
The gaze of 1 seamstress, who seems to be into the lens with a mocking smile, is the fateful element, the punctum described by critic and semiologist Roland Barthes, which acts as a detonator and pierces the attention. Andreani singles out and emphasizes it as a key level from which to increase the discourse, instantly implicating the viewer. The interference of the picture thus turns into a spot of anchorage for the artist’s reflection on ladies’s emancipation and the facility of divergence.

at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia
till March 10, 2024