by Chiara Nuzzi
Addosso,2010
installazione Fondazione Pomodoro
Archivio 19982010
Foto:Dario Tattamanzi
Courtesy dell’artista
Sissi is an italian artist born in Bologna, in 1977. She graduated at the Academy of Arts in Bologna and she now lives and works between Bologna and New York.
In the last years she has reached notoriety thanks to different exhibitions, collectives and solo.
In 2002 Sissi won the great prize “Furla for Art” at the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, in 2003 she gained the Francesca Alinovi Prize for performers, and in 2005 she won the “New York Prize”, being also elected as the artist of the year.
In 2009 she partecipated at the Venice Art Biennale and in 2010 she had a solo exhibition, “ADDOSSO”, at the A. Pomodoro Foundation in Milan.
Within her artistic code, she puts herself in the spotlight, being the object to contemplate and showing the shades of her self and of her identity.
Her body is the center of her research. Trough her performances she modifies and transforms it, assuming each time different new identities.
The artist offers her body as a temple, showing and fostering the multiplicity of life.
Her body owns it, shows it and lives it all, anyway leaving freedom to the spectator for his re-intepretation.
Installo sulla carne,2010
Foto:G.D’Aguano
Courtesy:Galleria Pantaleone
Therefore, her own body is identified with the art work, which is modified by dresses she sews and transforms by her own.
Like the body, also dresses and accessories are a constant work in progress, almost like a diary coming along with her life.
Onme,2010
Installazione, tecnica mista
Foto:Alessandro Di GIampietro
Sissi builds cumbersome disguises by common materials like if they were whole scenographies. Trough her disguises she becomes the object of observation and enters in her own sets.
She interprets clothing not just as mere appearance but as a way to stress her substance, to feel and translate all the declinations of a personal dense existence. Her incredible costumes seem to be kept from fairy tales of an ancient time, but her intent is different. Far from being a glamourous or aesthetic research, but maybe with some parodical intent towards the fashion system, her work and her dressing-up try an extreme attempt to tell honestly about her self.
That’s why in her vision of reality there is no difference between art and everyday life. There is no distinction between art and fiction.
Her ability in changing shape, dress, place, colours, position, makes Sissi inured so as to risult immune to the fear of change. So, she is strong and self controlled, free from the the lows of appearance, ready to adapt herself to different environments like every element of nature does.
Sissi will start this new year with a great solo exhibition, Abitanti, at the Fama Gallery in Verona, opening on the 4th of Febuary till the 20th of March.
Here she focuses on the ideas of flesh, body and material, leaving at the center of her work the garement, as a bridge between inside and outside, between privacy and collectivity.
Autoritratto con specchio,2010
stoffa, specchio
Courtesy :Fama Gallery
