I met Franca Sonnino in 2007 thanks to Mirella Bentivoglio, on the occasion of the exhibition Pages Image. In 2010, I invited her to exhibit two works in the exhibition Venti libristi, curated by Bentivoglio herself for the Cortese & Lisanti gallery. Over the years, the fruitful collaboration between me and Francesco Petillo led to opening Gramma_Epsilon Gallery in Athens in 2021, with Franca becoming one of the gallery’s leading artists. In 2022 I curated with Simona Campus a large anthological exhibition of her work, Franca Sonnino_Il filo il segno, lo spazio, in two venues: The MUACC in Cagliari and Gramma Epsilon Gallery in Athens.

In 2023 Franca held a solo show at the Jochum Rodgers gallery in Berlin and was featured in the exhibition Le dee perdute e ritrovate curated by Rosanna Ruscio and myself for the Mdina Bienniale (Malta), as well as in numerous other exhibitions at the MUAM in Gubbio, Gramma_Epsilon and Mouzakis Butterfly Factory in Athens. In 2024 her works are exhibited at Artissima in The different revolution project.

Franca Sonnino was born in Rome in 1932. After graduating in Literature, she began her artistic career in the early 1970s, dedicating herself to painting under the guidance of Maria Lai. Franca will remember her:

“I turned to Maria to take drawing lessons. At first, she always kept forgetting that promise, I had to chase her… Then, we started, but slowly. But I didn’t like drawing so much. She said it was not essential to know how to draw. I stopped and then started working with my hands, with the thread since I used to knit a lot. I understood that by beginning from a material that was already familiar to me I could do many other things.”

The thread, already present as the subject of her paintings, will soon become her privileged medium, definitively replacing the brush from the late 1970s. In this regard, Mirella Bentivoglio writes:

“Franca Sonnino is an artist who feels the space and, despite using a minute medium like the thread,” she makes space”. This artist redeems the domesticity of the thread in the breadth of the context where it is put; she made bricks of wire, and walls with these bricks, almost as a challenge to a millenarian absence of the woman – the weaver – from the construction of the house, which was her prison and her kingdom.”

Franca Sonnino’s work does not follow rigorous mathematical rules, but it is rather dictated by an inner poetic drive, linked to an irrational emotional impulse, which is at the same time sensorial. The art historian Franca Zoccoli summarizes as follows:

“Sonnino’s works come to fruition by slow progression, with organic growth, segment after segment, knitting knots one by one. Like nature’s products, they reject abstract Euclidean rigor, they are never regular or perfectly symmetrical.”

Mirella Bentivoglio was born in Klagenfurt in 1922 to Italian parents. From the earliest youth she wrote poetry books both in Italian and English. She later felt the calling for the joint use of verbal language and image, linking herself to the international neo-avant-garde of the second half of the Twentieth century. Her research focuses on the playful or disturbing relationship between language and image that she elaborates in the form of “object poetry”, installations and performances with the use of recurrent symbols such as the egg, the book, the tree.

The book-object is one of the central themes of her artistic and critical production. Her wide culture and depth of vision allow her to direct the developments of the experiments on the subject matter, also intervening to support the work of other artists. In fact, Mirella Bentivoglio soon became the reference point for a large group of artists, but above all female artists, operating in Italy and abroad from the 1960s.

In 1978 she curated the Materialization of Language exhibition for the Venice Biennale, where she exhibited works by 80 Italian and foreign artists, whose research focused on the relationship between language and image. After decades this review remains a unicum that gives us an overview of the state of female art in the 1970s, certainly on the edgeof the establishment and the market, but precisely for this reason capable of expressing total freedom and authentic experimentation.

As Bentivoglio explains in the exhibition catalog, “women’s poetry often tends to specularity, circularity, complementarity, to a subtle or violent primarization. And if it is true that in its final result the poetic expression, either of a man or a woman, is always total, hermaphrodite, it is also true that the grouping of many works from disparate times and places highlights certain constants of choices and of proceedings.”

In 2022, again with Gramma_Epsilon Gallery, we presented Metamorphosis, a monothematic project dedicated to her at Artissima in Turin, as part of the Back to the Future section.

When Mirella arrives at the Cortese & Lisanti gallery, along with this enormous wealth of experience, a fruitful collaboration begins, giving new and unexpected direction to my work. Between 2007 and 2011 Mirella Bentivoglio participated in numerous gallery exhibitions, both as curator and as an artist, bringing prominent names such as Franca Sonnino, Elisabetta Gut, Tomaso Binga, Renata Prunas, Emilio Villa, Gisella Meo, Anna Torelli, Chima Sunada, Giustina Prestento and Chiara Diamantini.
After her death in Rome in 2017, I reaffirmed my commitment to the promotion of her work.
As a result, in 2021 I curated with Davide Mariani a major retrospective exhibition entitled Mirella Bentivoglio_L’altra faccia della luna at Stazione dell’Arte in Ulassai (NU) and the following year, on the centenary of her birth, in Athens at the Italian Cultural Institute and Gramma_Epsilon Gallery.