Marta Ravasi’s paintings depict objects and elements of her everyday life, such as fruit and small domestic details. In the artist’s words, they are images “gathered, taken as if from a harvest season from the vast and endless reservoir of visual material in whose production we all collaborate”.
Ravasi’s works are not unconnected, but connected in succession, as if each were the verse of a long poem in the making.
Very often these verses are rewritten by the artist in different ways, changed in form and syntax, tone and emphasis, light and pictorial impasto, canvas size and use of brushstrokes. Always different descriptions of the same objects that give rhythm and concreteness to the overall structure of the poem, of Ravasi’s pictorial production.
The reading of her verse-works is done through free observation, and just as the artist is interested in writing the same things in many different ways, the public is left free to read and interpret the works according to their own personal feeling.
In the exhibition, Marta Ravasi’s paintings are placed in dialogue with the works of three artists from two of the most important contemporary art collections in the area: Alice Browne from the AGIVERONA Collection; Xinyi Cheng and Jutta Koether from the De Iorio Collection.
The mystery concealed by the objects and situations linked to the everyday portrayed by Xinyi Cheng in Incroyable (Monroe) (2019), as well as the work’s colour palette, brings us back to the suspension of meaning in Ravasi’s works.
The repetition that generates ambiguity of interpretation in the pictorial signs of Jutta Koether in Pink Ladies #4 (2020) represents a further element of contact with the reiteration of subjects in Ravasi’s paintings, as well as the transformations undergone from work to work by the elements she portrays, which dialogue well with the tendency towards abstraction present in Alice Browne’s painting New Legs (2009), in which the internal balancing of the pictorial composition is preponderant with respect to the precise representation of reality.
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Marta Ravasi (Merate, 1987; lives and works in Milan) studied painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas in Brussels and the University of the Arts London – Wimbledon College of Arts in London. He has exhibited in Italy and abroad at Fanta Spazio, Milan; Acappella, Naples; La Rada, Locarno; Sonnenstube, Lugano.
Xinyi Cheng (Wuhan, 1989; lives and works in Paris) studied at the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. From 2016 to 2017, he participated in the residency programme of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands. Her work was recently shown in a major solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.
Jutta Koether (Cologne, 1958; lives between New York and Berlin) studied art and philosophy at the University of Cologne and attended the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has had solo exhibitions in major institutions such as Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Mudam Luxembourg; PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern.
Alice Browne (Oxford, 1986, lives and works in London) studied at the University of the Arts London – Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Luisa Wang, Paris; Flatland Gallery, Amsterdam; Limoncello Gallery, London; Prosjektrom Normanns, Stavanger.
In collaboration with AGIVERONA Collection and De Iorio Collection curated by Treti Galaxie