about.

Seven years after the artist’s last solo exhibition in Rome, the STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI presents Tutto è foglia (Everything is a Leaf), featuring six large-scale oil works from the latest cycle of MANUELA FILIACI’s paintings. Born in Vicenza, the artist has been based in New York for over 20 years.

The exhibition title refers to Goethe’s Travels in Italy (1786), in which the artist and scientist understands and sums up his conception of nature: a plant is only ever a leaf, so inextricably bound to the future seed that we cannot think of one without the other.

The tree has been a recurring theme of Filiaci‘s pictorial practice in recent years, a plant in which the artist can immerse themselves completely, where the repeated exploration of a specific detail becomes almost meditative. Lightness, wryness and light itself are the antithesis to an overwhelming materiality: this vision of nature invites both a reflection on the precariousness and fragility of that which surrounds us, but also the possibility of transformation and regeneration.

Manuela Filiaci has been actively involved in the New York art scene since the 1980s, exhibiting in various galleries, working with the “La Mama” theatre, and from 1979 to 1987 as the curator of “Parallel Window”, a space which presented the work of artists of different nationalities.

More than one critic has understood Filiaci‘s work in relation to music, given the artist’s particular sensitivity when organising the spatial and chromatic relations of her pictorial vocabulary, which for a long time involved fragments of classical architecture. Colour plays an extremely important role in her work, representing a mental state, a sensation that seeks to unite the mind with the senses.

Alongside her painting – which undoubtedly constitutes the majority of her practice – Filiaci has also continued to express herself in three-dimensional works, sculptures and assemblages of paper, wood and bronze. This is true of Real Cubism, an assemblage of painted cardboard boxes presented at Rivoli Castle as part of the Collezionismo a Torino (Collecting in Turin) exhibition.

Read and download the exhibition’s press release.

works.

here below are some images from MANUELA FILIACI’s tutto è foglia.

more catalogues.

more catalogues by MANUELA FILIACI shown at STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI