Artist Spotlight Series: Francesca Pasquali

Francesca Pasquali: "Material Anatomy" - - Viewing Room - Leila Heller Gallery

Introduction

Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present “Material Anatomy,” Italian artist Francesca Pasquali’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. In her wall reliefs and site specific installations, manufactured plastic materials such as straws and neoprene make up intricate sculptural structures, and prompt a dialogue with the region’s unique and nuanced relationship to petrochemicals. Tightly bound or folded together, the often monochrome structures follow rhythmic configurations, recalling coral and microscopic anatomies. “Material Anatomy” presents several works across the artist’s practice, including works from the Frappa series, playfully named after the iconic layered Italian pastry.

Francesca Pasquali received her degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. In 2013, alongside other artists and the curator Ilaria Bignotti, she founded the artistic movement “Resilienza italiana” with the goal of further developing the international dialogue surrounding sculpture by contemporary and emerging artists.

A finalist of the 2015 Cairo Prize and Second Prize at the Henraux Foundation Prize in 2014, Pasquali has also been invited to participate in several major international art fairs, and her works are housed in important private and public institutions such as the Museo Diocesano, Brescia, the MAR Museo d’Arte della Città, Ravenna, the Ghisla Art Collection, Locarno; and the Thetis Foudation, Venice.

Interview With the Artist

LHG: What have you been doing during quarantine? Have you been able to visit your studio?

FP: Around me, to my loved ones, there is a truly paradoxical situation, it seems to watch a never wanted movie. However, I am convinced that in such a dark and sad period, we must find within us resources and motivations to make sure that everything starts again as soon as possible, with renewed enthusiasm and desire to do. DO! this is the imperative .... my doing is in art, my welcoming refuge.

I live in the countryside and my studio is a few steps from the house. I see it from the window as soon as I wake up. It just waits to be lived, to get dirty, to be messed up!!! This is my great luck, to be able to continue working pending receipt of new dates for the exhibitions that have been suspended today.
Suspended? Delete? Who can say it with certainty today?

Today the phone no longer rings, no reassuring e-mail arrives except those that communicate that exhibitions, fairs, events are suspended or postponed. The galleries are inactive. But we did not give up, we invented a new way of enjoying art, because the desire to know and see does not subside. Never before have social and web become vital and tuneful way of connection between the isolated self and the whole world.

LHG: How do you think art can effect dark times like these?

FP: These are the moments in which re-emerge the sense of community, of union, and the true values that keep a system up and running return. The same values that I try to convey with my work: involvement, activation, sharing, love for beauty. Culture is a common good, essential. Without art, understood in the broadest meaning, there are no emotions, beauty and harmony.

LHG: When did you first become interested in art?

FP: I became my research around plastic materials during the Accademy of Fine Art, more or less 14 years ago. Every day I’m looking for simple common objects and industrial stuff not used in art. The aim is to give a second life to these materials by interlacing and assembling them, in order to create immersive and interactive installation capable to involve viewers in my world.