OVERVIEW

Margherita Raso

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2021

1991

Italy

Fanta-MLN

Margherita Raso was born in Lecco, Italy, in 1991 and currently lives in Basel. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Casting The Tempo, Santa Maria in Lucedio Abbey, Vercelli, I, 2021; Canal, Bible, New York, USA, 2018; Piercing, Fanta-MLN, Milan, I, 2017. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, I, 2021; MACRO, Rome, I, 2021; Villa Olmo, Como, I, 2021; Fanta-MLN, Milan, I, 2020; WPN-NYC, New York, USA, 2019; WallRiss, Fribourg, CH, 2019; MAMbo, Bologna, I, 2018; Armada, Milan, I, 2016; Komplot, Bruxelles, B, 2015.

The artist’s practice is informed by the interest in the “skin” of objects and in the different modes of perception and understanding of the work. Through the use of Jacquard-weaved textiles, the artist investigates the role and the meaning of texture. By creating microscopic reliefs of different scales and dimensions, namely woven drawings, her intent is to access a space simultaneously with a painting and a sculpture while tearing them both from their immobility. Textile is also employed in the realization of ceramic, bronze and cast-iron sculptures. These works are the results of an experimental p ...

1
Somersaults, 2021 (detail). Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Somersaults, 2021, similarly to the earlier work W0934.A, 2018, is composed of traces of human bodies. Their profiles, first registered on canvas, are the drawings on which the textile composition is based. The viewers are invited to confront themselves with a choreographed inventory of bodies, depicted in the act of falling and raising, slightly bigger than life. Thanks to the jacquard weaving technique, Margherita Raso initiates a dimensional and material transfer, where the image and the object penetrate each other and become a sculptural composition. The drawing is not imposed o ...

4 klein
Somersaults, 2021 Photo: Andrea Rossetti
3
V2 A5710
Untitled, 2021 (detail) Photo: Roberto Marossi

The sculpture’s texture comes from the front and back of one of Margherita Raso’s jacquard fabric works, casted into the ghostly shape of a body. Through a process that stresses the boundaries of the traditional lost-wax casting technique, the textile gets sacrificed and its texture remains impressed onto the metal surface. In an irreversible narrative of shapes and materials oscillating between different statuses, the work reflects the vulnerability of a body.

  • Untitled, 2021 Photo: Roberto Marossi
Item 1 of 5
Margherita Raso Lucedio Beppe Raso 11
Lentezza No. 1, 2021 (detail) Photo: Beppe Raso

Lentezza No. 1, 2021 belongs to a group of works developed by the artist in the past two years, and presented in her most recent solo exhibition “Casting The Tempo”, curated by Paola Nicolin at Santa Maria in Lucedio Abbey, Vercelli (IT) and produced by APTITUDEforthearts. Here, the body abstracts itself into color and light, resulting in the encounter of red and blue threads—two colors conventionally used to visualise the two extremes of temperature. Raso’s long-standing attention to how bodies interact was applied to Vercelli’s rural landscape, and developed through an in-depth research o ...

MR Lentezza1 02
Lentezza No. 1, 2021 (details) Photo: Beppe Raso
MR Lentezza1 01

Montez Press Radio as Tongue and Cheek - Ep28: Looms of Sound with Margherita Raso and Kali Malone interviewed by Emma McCormick-Goodhart recorded live on May 29th 2021 at 12th-century Lucedio Abbey, Italy, where Raso and Malone collaborated on a sound installation on the occasion of Raso’s exhibition “Casting the Tempo”.

82 V7248
Brillamento, 2018 Photo: Gina Folly
82 V7251
181103 Bible 016
W0934.A, 2018 (detail) Photo: Dan Bradica

A certain kind of beauty resides in the ability of some objects to initiate a reflexive consideration of our perceptual experience. These objects stimulate the awareness of our physical and sensory capacity. In the reconciliation with our limits, we suddenly become conscious of our body’s perimeter.

Another type of beauty derives from the sudden encounter of two bodies in the middle ground. In the acts of their precarious coexistence, they generate a choreography on the threshold between attraction and resistance. This dialectic movement is the unresolved blend of originality and ...

181103 Bible 001
Installation view of Canal, Bible, New York, USA, 2018 Photo: Dan Bradica
181103 Bible 015
W0934.A, 2018 (detail) Photo: Dan Bradica