Until September 8 and October 13: HIDE ME IN YOUR BELLY and COLORESCENZE – ARTISTE, TOSCANA, FUTURO, Centro Pecci, Viale della Repubblica, 277, Prato. Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday from 10 am – 7 pm, closed Monday and Tuesday. Admission: €10, or €7 discounted.
Colorescenze – Artiste, Toscana, Futuro is an exhibition that displays the works of 12 female artists, either Tuscan by heritage or by choice. The show aims to highlight the multigenerational talents that create pieces, taking inspiration and materials common to the area and reworking them into expressive pieces that characterise the unique creative density and culture native to Tuscany. Ideologically the exhibition as a whole offers an alternative, multifaceted mode of creation in opposition to established male artists, taking the foundations of familiarity and quotidian surroundings and extracting diverse, futuristic and introspective renditions of reality.
Chinese artist Yu Ji’s first solo show in Italy, Hide Me In Your Belly is also on display at the Centro Pecci. The artist, who now resides locally in Prato, aims to confront through her multimedia pieces the notion of physical space and their corresponding historical narratives. In particular, Yu Ji’s artistic language seeks to describe the position and state of the body and flesh in the physical world in which we inhabit, taking inspiration for this show from fairytales, wildlife, the city of Prato and the museum itself.
Opening simultaneously, these exhibitions both highlight themes of the physical being as they exist in different environments, the diverse experieces that emerge from shared territory, with Colorscenze[…] exploring the legacy of the multifaceted culture of otherness in the female experience, applying this to a confrontation of the future and as an opportunity to reflect on the current, Hide Me In Your Belly detailing instead the ever-evolving condition of the body and the reciprocal relationship of the self and the environment.
Colorescenze[…], exhibits pieces from the artists Francesca Banchelli, Chiara Bettazzi, Chiara Camoni, Giulia Cenci, Isabella Costabile, Daniela De Lorenzo, Helena Hladilová, Christiane Löhr, Lucia Marcucci, Margherita Moscardini, Moira Ricci and Sandra Tomboloni, from sculpture to painting, videography to site-specific installations. The title of the exhibition is a play on words of the Italian ‘conoscenze’, or knowledge in English, combining it with the Italian for ‘colour’. This portmanteau is also found in one of the collages by Lucia Marcucci, displayed in the exhibition, aiming to unite the disciplines of art and science with wisdom, against the background of hyper-feminine imagery and magazine cuttings, as is characteristic of the artists’ evocative, feminist pieces. As an artistic response to the spur of alternative canon following feminism of the 70s, this body of work of women is inherently moving against the grain of the proposed ‘conoscenze’ in Italy.
Visitors to the exhibition are greeted with the Sister (del Ravaneto), created by Chiara Camoni of the Lucca area. Made from natural materials and terracotta pieces organised into necklaces draped over a foreboding figure, the sculpture is part of a series of sculptures by Camoni entitled Sisters. For the artist, these ambiguous figures emerge from the unconscious and collate a collective body of sisterhood, embracing the natural elements, subverting definite temporality and rejecting confining labels in their plural existence. This Sister’s creation thus serves as an attestation to the transformative regeneration and proactive nature of the wilderness.
Following this is the aforementioned collages from artist Marcucci, from which the exhibition extracts its name. Dating from the 60s and 70s Marcucci’s works focus on the misogynistic and patriarchal language and images which appeared in mass media of the era, in particular in the tabloids. Surprisingly applicable to the modern feminist conversation, Marcucci’s work revels in the denouncing of patriarchal ideas regarding women without rejecting inherent femininity in the process. The reclamation of the remarkably feminine images in the collages working in tandem with the evocative phrases extracted from magazines presents an artistic space of consideration for female issues occuring in the artist’s political context. Eliciting conversations regarding abortion, the independence of women as detached from the nuclear family and ecological issues, the collection highlights the gravity of these issues and yet the infantilising, flippant attitude towards female issues and their existence.
Another artist in the exhibition is Francesca Banchelli who has provided a painting with dreamlike, abnormal realities, transforming regular figures of humans, animals, plants and minerals into apocalyptic reimaginations in a ‘’non-place space’’. The painting presents this amalgamation of beings as having formed a society and community, with a central focus on a mirror held up to the viewer reflecting either a sunrise or a sunset, made ambiguous by the natural colours employed unnaturally.
Chiara Bettazi provides a site-specific installation, which calls into question the accumulation and rejection of material objects and the potential to reuse post-industrial landscapes. A plant element is also incorporated, referencing the Tuscan scenery which seizes the urban backdrop of the piece, reflecting the artists’ rejection of consumerism, pollution and exploitation of natural resources on a mass scale. Similarly, Moira Ricci’s photography series ‘Dove Il Cielo È Più Vicino’, takes familiar Tuscan landscapes and reconfigures them with a touch of peculiarity. Ricci paradoxes the Maremma countryside and its farmers with the recurring cliché of American sci-fi films with spaceships in fields, calling into question the disconnect between humans and the environment.
The exhibition closes with the sculptures of Helena Hladilová, employing conventions of Italian and Czech folklore, the artist also explores the importance of living creatures and the inert materials with which they are associated. With a background in Carrara and marble sculpting, Hladilová centralises matters of extraction and extinction in her works, creating pieces that present absurd mutations of creatures to bring attention to the irresponsible use of natural resources, questioning the context of production and presentation of sculptures.
Hide Me In Your Belly
Artist Yu Ji, in residence in Prato, spends her time at this exhibition continually transforming the Ala Piccola Nio of the Centro Pecci, treating the space not only as a fountain of inspiration but also as a studio. Through a range of artistic forms, the artist both narrates the occurrences of her life but also engages with other notions. For instance, interpreting the space of the Ala Piccola Nio as a spiralling interior similar to that of a shell or snail, thought of by the being itself as a home, and to larger entities as food, thus presenting at once the being inside of the stomach and threat of belonging inside the belly of the predator.
The artist also presents purposely unfinished forms of various body parts, scattered across the space’s floor. Knees, headless torsos, arms and legs appearing as fragmented pieces of exhaustion but pieces resistant to total elimination.
Most significantly this exhibition consists of video projections which illuminates a connection between Ji’s sculptural practice and recreational interactions with her son, in return presenting within the space what the artist uses it for; a studio, a space for her child to enjoy and as a place of research. Yu Ji also engages in artistic dialogue with Mario Merz whose exhibition at the Pecci Centre in 1990 paid homage to the spiral, once again proving the intergenerational and cross-cultural nature of the museum’s current thematic direction. (Lucy Turner)
