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Category: artist_e

“E” for Elisabetta

from the catalogue ELISABETTA GUT_ALPHABETS curated by Paolo Cortese and Rosanna Ruscio pubblished by Gramma_Epsilon in occasione of the retrospective exhibition hold in Athens 13.03 – 13.06.2025

I ask Elisabetta to explain the works we chose together for a project to be presented at an important international fair.(1)
We’re standing near the glass doors that lead from her living room to the garden and its unusually open. She points to the large magnolia towering in front of us and, in her rough voice, says, “One day I picked up a leaf from the ground, held it in my hand, looked at it… and it was a book!” As she speaks, she mimics opening a book with her joined hands. Then she adds, “It’s like in that song…” and hums a bit the famous Sergio Endrigo melody, “Ci vuole un fiore, per fare un libro, ci vuole l’albero!”.(2)

For Elisabetta, everything follows precise rules, but these are not easily accessible or visible. Following the hidden thread of her thoughts, she continues, “Works don’t need to be explained, they need to be understood.” I know her well and don’t ask anything but wait. She turns and looks around. I follow her gaze, the walls of the living room are covered with works from different eras. The dominant colour is clearly white, many are geometric assemblages of a constructivist style with subtle black or aluminum-colored inserts. Above a large bookcase, there are yellow perspex prisms, aged by time and smoke. On the desk and drawing table, visual poetry works are neatly arranged, some of which have been waiting patiently for years to be completed. On white bases of different sizes, protected by perspex display cases, there are object-books, perhaps the works for which she is most well-known today.

“People don’t understand anything,” she starts, referring to the gallery owners, “It’s like with musicians: first, you learn the notes, study the solfeggio, do the scales, then you start with little sonatinas, chamber music, symphonies, and then you play jazz!” She turns to me, “Visual poetry is jazz! If I hadn’t done all this before, I could never have created works like those!” she says, pointing at the Musical Instruments (3) I approach to take a closer look. They are collages on A4 Fabriano sheets, glued onto a wooden base and encased in a perspex case. Inside, on thin cardboard supports, are attached fragments of musical writings, dried seeds, and feathers, while black cotton threads, like the strings of musical instruments, are stretched through tiny holes.

I had never related those small masterpieces of visual poetry to the series of Fugues, Counterpoints, or Kites, which were also created in the 1970s.(4)
Thinking about it, in all these years, I had never really seen, except very briefly, her earlier works, those from the ’50s and ’60s, which after the major exhibition curated by Mirella Bentivoglio in Macerata in 1981,(5) Elisabetta never wanted to exhibit again, as if they represented a mortgage on her affiliation with the neo-avant-garde logo-iconic movements.

When, a few months before her death,(6) her daughter Bettina asked me to help organize her archive, I finally had access to the entire body of her works, and everything I had heard her talk about took shape like a puzzle that, in its entirety, but also in its smallest pieces, encapsulates the essence of the art and the person of this extraordinary artist: Elisabetta Gut.

Flipping through the albums from the early 50s, when she was still attending the art institute, and opening the folders filled with studies, projects, and exercises, one cannot help but notice the mastery of line and color. The lines are definite, still and incisive, even when they are intentionally light. The color combinations are bold, strong, and contemporary. Nothing predicts that within ten years her work will turn toward an almost total abandonment of color.

On the contrary, the interest in spatial dimensions, already present in her early works, would remain a constant in the artist’s research,(7) observable in all the multiple phases of her long journey.
Since her first solo exhibition, held at the Cairola Gallery in Milan in 1956 and presented by Felice Casorati, Elisabetta gathered great critical and market success, selling most of the works exhibited. In this early phase, when she signed as Elisa,(8) we could say the artist was still experimenting with the tools at her disposal and refining her mastery, so her attention seemed directed outward. But by the early ’60s, all her energy rapidly shifted toward a search for the self, a search that would accompany her always and would constantly characterize her work.

In this sense, the selection of works presented here, dating from the early ’60s to the most recent works, should be understood. The intention is to emphasize the fil rouge connecting them, that irresistible drive of the ego to emerge and find, through the works, an enduring celebration. Naturally, this journey, over time, goes through distinct phases, but it is no coincidence that the first work in this exhibition, In Search of Lost Time (Proust) from 1961, and the last one, Ego from 2018, even in their titles, are exemplary of the terms through which this long creative arc unfolds.

P.C.

1.Conversation held in Rome at the artist’s home, in September 2019. The project referenced is Three Approaches to Poetry: M. Bentivoglio, A. Etlinger, E. Gut, Artissima Oval Lingotto, Turin, November 2019.
2. Ci vuole un fiore, song by Sergio Endrigo, lyrics by G. Rodari, 1974.
3. The artist created several series of Musical Instruments exhibited in the following solo exhibitions: Semi e segni, Galleria Cortese & Lisanti, Rome, 2009; Books Without Words: The Visual Poetry of Elisabetta Gut, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, USA, 2010; Cutting through: the Art of Elisabetta Gut, Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG), Maitland, Australia, 2012.
4. These are three series of assemblages created between 1972 and 1978 and exhibited in the following events: Gut, Palazzo Arengario, Monza, December 7-18, 1973; X Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte di Roma. Artisti stranieri operanti in Italia, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, June 9 – July 10, 1977; Elisabetta Gut 1956-1981: un filo ininterrotto, curated by M. Bentivoglio, Pinacoteca e Musei Comunali, Macerata, 1981.
5. Elisabetta Gut 1956-1981: un filo ininterrotto, Ibidem.
6. Elisabetta Gut passed away in Rome on May 16, 2024.
7. See N. Ponente, 1970; M. Torrente, 1973; G. Montana, 1976; M. Bentivoglio, 1981, 2009.
8. The artist initially, when signing her full name, used her first name, Elisa.

The Different Revolution

12 November, 2024 – 25 February, 2025

Gramma_Epsilon Gallery in Athens presents the group exhibition curated by Paolo Cortese ‘The Different Revolution’. A preview of which was also presented during Artissima 2024, and aims to document the research carried out since the 1970s by 20 female artists, most of whom are Italian.

Fifty years of protest: battles, struggles and debate in order to see women finally emerge from a society which rejected their passage into history. A protest staged in the most diverse ways: politics, theatre, student demonstrations, but also through the unique voice of the talented who fought using art in order to be heard: these are the protagonists who knew how to write that part of history in a truly unpredictable way.

Women who, during the general climate of protest in the 1970s, fought to reclaim a role that could no longer be ignored: female art collectives soon formed and came together to share their lived experiences and to support each other. Many women artists chose to hit the streets and took part at the forefront of the demonstrations, while others carried out their revolution in a different way, maybe seemingly less obvious, yet equally as powerful.

Although it excluded these courageous pioneers from the art market, their decision to use as working tools the items that were close to hand and most compatible with their creative practice, allowed them to experiment in complete autonomy with new materials, understanding their abilities and sometimes surpassing their limits.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was Mirella Bentivoglio who supported the struggle for female emancipation by curating exhibitions for female artists, and Gramma_Epsilon Gallery continues her legacy today by introducing to the public the work of these extraordinary artists who dedicated their life to that challenge.

Their revolution was powerful, intellectual and, at times, silent. They used art as a link between the inner vision, the dream and its expression. A powerful Trojan horse able to break down all kinds of barriers and allow all women to fulfil their dreams and live their daily lives without having to give up the role that the society of the time imposed on them.

Artists: Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Sara Campesan, Francesca Cataldi, Chiara Diamantini, Lia Drei, Anna Esposito, Elisabetta Gut, Maria Lai, Rosanna Lancia, Gisella Meo, Clemen Parrocchetti, Giustina Prestento, Renata Prunas, Lilli Romanelli, Anna Maria Sacconi, Alba Savoi, Greta Schödl, Franca Sonnino, Anna Torelli.
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BOOKS AS ART

I LIBRI, LE ARTISTE

The exhibition Books As Art. I Libri, le artiste will be presented on Thursday 5 December, at 18.00, in the presence of Rector Francesco Mola. It will be the third installment of a multi-year project promoted by MUACC, in collaboration with Gramma_Epsilon Gallery,  Athens. The overarching mission of the project is focused on ‘restoring’ women’s artistic research back into the cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Research that has been pushed to the margins of the cultural system for centuries, yet now sits in a context that has become essential to the international field of art studies and to the current historical-critical debate. 

After the two previous solo exhibitions dedicated to Franca Sonnino and Francesca Cataldi, Books As Art. I libri, Le artiste now focuses on a large group exhibition in which seventy works, by more than fifty artists, are presented in book form.

The book is, in fact, of key importance in women’s artistic research starting with the groundbreaking exhibition ‘The Materialization of Language’, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio in the context of the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978. In this exhibition and during the numerous initiatives curated in the 1980s and 1990s, Mirella Bentivoglio developed her terminology that became central to her entire aesthetic approach: the form and meaning of the book unite two realms, that of Logos, language, and that of Mater, matter. Two opposing but complementary worlds that merge into singular, communicative, and at times, silent poetic testimonies. Where Mater also encapsulates, etymologically, the need to assert an anti-rhetorical idea of motherhood and femininity. 

Carrying on that legacy, Books As Art. I libri, le artiste examines the book, or rather, books, by women artists in their conceptual and material dimensions, and across all of their possible manifestations. Books published in limited experimental copies, which within the two-dimensionality of the page encompass the hybridization of design and photography; object-books, in their three-dimensional and multi-material form, set forth the harmonious blend of different signs and cultures. Books made of threads, those of a coherent yet ever-changing, ever-evolving discourse. Books that become the medium of connection and contamination between verbal and visual code. Books as different experiences – capturing and linking the realm of thought, word and image directly to the realm of existence. 

A broad palimpsest of small-grand masterpieces unfolds along the exhibition itinerary, starting from the late 1960s and the early 1970s – with In Principio Erat (1971), by Ketty La Rocca, whose images are both a photographic and a performative idiom – until today. Many works are groundbreakers made in an attempt to tear down the patriarchy, such as Tomasso Binga’s Tempo presente, (1977). Others were exhibited in Venice, in 1978, as in the case of Leviathan, a book-sculpture by Gisella Meo, and Iperipotenusa by Lia Drei. From 1978 Maria Lai’s Libro scalpo, elaborated from the Volume-oggetto, also exhibited in ‘Materialization of Language.’ From 1991 Imago Imago, an extraordinary book by Lucia Marcucci, a pioneer of Visual Poetry, also epitomised by the quasi-contemporary Afasia (1992). Other, more recent works demonstrate the dynamic research of female authors over time, as in the case of Francesca Cataldi and Franca Sonnino, who both exhibit at MUACC, with The Book of War (2024) by the latter, symbolically referring to today’s dramatic international scene. Female authors of the past are brought together with artists of recent generations and of different nationalities – among them Astra Papachristodoulou, Maria Jole Serreli, Giulia Spernazza – who represent the conceptual, verbo-visual, and fiber art movement, and who continue to explore – from different points of view, and consistently through their own poetic approaches – the infinite potential of the book as a form of connection, as a statement and vindication. Above all, a claim to freedom. 

Books as Art was first shown at Gramma_Epsilon in Athens in 2023, and now introduced as an extended and renewed version, specifically designed for the University Museum of Cagliari. For each of the two exhibition events, Maria Jole Serreli developed two new performances: the performance designed for the Cagliari edition accompanied the preview of the show as part of the Pazza Idea Festival. 

Books as Art will be compiled into a single catalogue, published in both English and Italian. 

Artists

Marilla Battilana, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Anna Boschi, Francesca Cataldi, Betty Danon, Chiara Diamantini, Neide Dias de Sá, Lia Drei, Anna Esposito, Fernanda Fedi, Ileana Florescu, Coco Gordon, Elisabetta Gut, Marianna Karava, Susanne Kessler, Maria Lai, Rosanna Lancia, Liliana Landi, Ketty La Rocca, Carolina Lombardi, Virginia Lorenzetti, Sara Lovari, Lucia Marcucci, Gisella Meo, Patrizia Molinari, Aurèlia Muñoz, Elly Nagaoka, Riri Negri, Francesca Nicchi, Giulia Niccolai, Antonietta Orsatti, Luana Perilli, Astra Papachristodoulou, Renata Prunas, Betty Radin, Franca Rovigatti, Anna Maria Sacconi, Giovanna Sandri, Alba Savoi, Marilena Scavizzi, Evelina Schatz, Greta Schödl, Maria Jole Serreli, Franca Sonnino, Giulia Spernazza, Chima Sunada, Dora Tass, Salette Tavares, Anna Torelli, Anna Uncini.

INFO

ELISABETTA GUT

My relationship with Elisabetta Gut consolidated during her solo exhibition Semi e Segni at the Cortese & Lisanti gallery, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio in 2009. In the following year she was invited by Mirella Bentivoglio to participate with two works in the exhibition Venti libristi, an important event dedicated to the book-object.

Libro foglia, 1990
La natura è incorreggibile, 1990

The figure of Elisabetta Gut is featured in the major group exhibitions I have curated in recent years at Gramma_Epsilon in Athens, and since her death I have been examining her archive.

Personal exhibition of Elisabetta Gut at the art Gallery “Il Carpine” in Rome

“In her youth she walked all the steps of a real artistic preparation, with professional precision and then, luckily, she joined the groups of the new experimental poetry. And she made this choice despite having all options open in the field of the pure visual arts; esteemed by artists like Lucio Fontana and rigorous critics like Nello Ponente, she made her decision in total loyalty to herself. In the mix of codes, that is, in the combined use of writing and image, she has rediscovered the freedom from any scheme typical of the childhood, the immediate freshness of mankind and history pervaded by nature.”

Mirella Bentivoglio in Seeds and Signs, 2009

Donna che salta la sedia, 1982
Arabesque, 1986

Elisabetta Gut was born in Rome in 1934 but spent her childhood in Zurich. In Rome she attended the Institute of Art and after an initial painting experience of post-Cubist and eventually of informal imprint, she approached the verbo-visual neo-avantgarde that was emerging in literary circles. She began to experiment the relationship between image and writing, creating collages and assemblages where she added scriptural fragments and plant elements.

Note sfumate, 1983

“For this artist, denial and affirmation are identical. She was the first one to use the wire both as a symbol of deletion and musical notation, as a pentagram and a string for inaudible vibrations at the same time. And it is precisely that surliness that guarantees intensity. The difficult part in operations like these, when taking up an iconography widely characterized as poetic, is the ability to remove it from any established poeticism, to regain, thanks to the magisterium of fantasy, a native freshness within the very structures of culture.”

Mirella Bentivoglio in Plume de Poète, 1989

FRANCA SONNINO

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.

From left: Luigi Scialanga, Franca Sonnino, Mirella Bentivoglio, Maria Lai, 1980

Sonninos, Repettos and me

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.”

Muro appeso al chiodo, 1982
Place Vendôme, 1987

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.”

Libro nero and Libro con scrittura, Artissima, Turin, 2019
Campi coltivati 2, 1988

MIRELLA BENTIVOGLIO

I met Mirella Bentivoglio in 2007, while organizing an exhibition on Shu Takahashi. She called me because she owned a work of the Japanese artist and wanted to sell it, so I went to see it. The thing that struck me most was her extreme vitality. She quickly showed me Takahashi’s work and then started talking about her work. From then on, we started a friendship that greatly influenced my way of seeing art and not only art.

Opening of I silenzi di Anna Torelli, 2008

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.

Autoritratto in auto (e fuori), 2004

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.”

With Leonetta Bentivoglio at the exhibition Il soggetto imprevisto. 1978 Arte e Femminismo in Italia, Frigoriferi Milanesi, Milano, 2019

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.

Da forte a pianissimo, 1980
Exhibition catalog Materializzazione del linguaggio, Magazzini del Sale alle Zattere, Venice, 1978
Fou/lard (Il foulard folle), 1971
Strutture simboliche – E, mutilazione per accentuazione, 1978

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.

Pannello per finestra di città. Addio (agli alberi), 1971