Elisabetta Benassi
Autoritratto al lavoro
MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome
Curated by Luca Lo Pinto
9 May–25 August 2024
Autoritratto al lavoro is the first major anthological exhibition on Elisabetta Benassi presented by an institution active in the city where she lives and works. The project presents over twenty years of her artistic output, juxtaposing works from the early 2000s with more recent pieces, and three new productions made for the show.
Moving freely across a wide range of languages, media and imagery—an approach that has always been a distinctive earmark of her research—Benassi wryly observes the cultural, critical and artistic legacy of modernity, with the aim of “entering history not to quote from it, but to bring it back to life in the present, creating a sort of intrusion”, suggesting a constantly paradoxical idea of time. Convinced of the potential offered by an exhibition, more than individual works, to convey an idea in a complex way, the artist has chosen to reflect on the very notion of a retrospective, formulating a large installation: a mise-en-scène of her works, built through a system of architectures and settings arranged in space like theatrical wings. Each of these modular structures has been conceived to host one work—partially concealing it from the gaze of visitors—and at the same time to respond to its specific narrative and poetic intentions, thus offering a new device for experiencing the works, which have often taken form in response to specific sites, situations, and time frames.
Each structures, covered with modular plaster panels bearing traces of the moulds used to create it, appears as a sculptural body with brutalist features, resulting in a display that becomes an artistic intervention in its own right. Following the suggestion implied in the title, the exhibition presents itself as a possible self-portrait of the artist at work, aimed at generating a visual and linguistic score in which the pieces are presented by association, intentionally avoiding chronological order.
Thanks to the coherence of the display and the continuity provided by the plaster architecture, the artist enacts a system of formal harmony, offering a discursive framework for her research, which has always defied systems of classification, rejecting any ideas of style and canon.
Courtesy Photos: Elisabetta Benassi, Agnese Bedini-DSL Studio, Michela Pedranti-DSL Studio
