Margherita Manzelli Le signorine
Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Viale della Repubblica, 277, 59100 Prato PO, Italia
14 December 2024 – 11 May 2025
Curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol
Supported by ValeriaNapoleoneXXArtists (VNXXA)
Centro Pecci is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Margherita Manzelli, opening on 13 December 2024. Margherita Manzelli. Le signorine, an exhibition project in which Intesa Sanpaolo is partner, features a selection of paintings from the 1990s to the present, displayed alongside a series of drawings and a group of works created specifically for the exhibition, one of which is inspired by the cathedral of the city of Prato.
The title, Le Signorine, reflects the artist's way of referring to the female figures that have long populated her works. Independent, proud, timeless, and androgynous, Manzelli’s “signorine” take centre stage and determine their own modes and forms of representation, challenging deep-rooted conventions and claiming their independence from family ties.
Since the beginning, the artist's practice has been centred on the exploration of three elements: painting, performance, and writing. Manzelli's desire to connect these seemingly disparate areas of interest has allowed her to develop a body of work unique in Italy. After studying in Ravenna, she moved to Milan in the early 1990s, during a decade that regarded the return of painting with some scepticism after the excesses of the 1980s.
In her subjects, the female body — along with the exploration of her own visionary obsessions — becomes a pretext for delving into painterly experimentation and for indiscriminately pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic genres. Ultimately, it allows for a playful engagement with the ambiguity of the artist’s condition, suspended between the need to expose and circulate her work and the desire to withdraw to protect herself on a human and personal level.
The signorine are figures who have always and consistently populated the artist’s imagination and work. With determination, Manzelli has explored their psychological tensions, revealing both their fragility and resilience. Hyper-alert and pale, nude or semi-nude, they seem ready either for dissection or to defy convention; restrained by the thin barrier of their own skin and with gazes that spill over and pierce those who look at them, these women overturn the assumptions of representations of the female body in art history, typically conceived for the male gaze.
In the paintings, the young women are placed within an abstract spatiality, composed of broad fields with geometric patterns and floral motifs, evoking the designs of imaginary or real fabrics — even those of the artist’s own garments — or in spaces defined by coloured vertical bands. Central to Manzelli’s work is the relationship between the subject and the background, held in a constant tension where the figures seem to both emerge from and merge with the context. In this perceptual exercise, with background colours shaping the facial features of the signorine, Manzelli captivates the viewer.
For more than thirty years, the head has been the starting point of the artist’s exploration, from which her vision takes shape and her obsessions are given a voice. In the drawings presented in the exhibition, the head emerges from a white field, as often seen in Manzelli’s works on paper. Through her works, Manzelli seems to evoke an awareness of the fragility and resilience of the human condition, a sentiment experienced globally during the recent pandemic. The head is less a site of neurosis, and more a complex formal element capable of synthesising and conveying facial features with stories and emotions. A boundless source for the expressive possibilities of art.
