Silvia Giambrone Italian, b. 1981

Silvia Giambrone's radical, multi-dimensional art seeks to seduce and disrupt, connecting the familiar and the personal to the sacred and unknown. In her performance, sculpture, film and collage, she explores the dynamics of power that codify and structure all aspects of life, exposing humanity's tendency for violence, whilst simultaneously calling into question its domestication and normalisation.

 

Born in Agrigento, Sicily in 1981, Giambrone studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where she continues to live and work. Profoundly influenced by the Italian feminist philosopher Carla Lonzi, ambiguity lies at the core of her works, which reflect, with intense focus, on the ethics of knowledge and the voices of those unheard and unseen.

 

In Giambrone's performances, themes of trauma, compliance and identity come to the fore, often with the artist centre stage, as the object of direct and unflinching scrutiny. In works such as Sotto tiro (Under Fire, 2013) or Teatro anatomico (Anatomical Theatre, 2012), her body becomes a battleground across which the rules of patriarchy can play out: her face the target of a gun's laser in the former, her neck the site of a sutured lace collar in the latter. A paradigmatic material in her practice which conflates ideas of 'feminine' labour, beauty, wealth and control, lace features in many of the artist's other works such as the series 'Collars' (2012); 'Collars (Light box)', (2018) and 'Il Pizzo' (Protection Money, 2012). Another product of traditional 'women's work', embroidery, is used in 'Eroina' ('Heroin', 2018) - a group of abstract compositions sewn with black thread that trace the shape of heroin cells and, along with them, an inference of impending self-destruction.

 

The condition of survival and the mechanisms of silence that accompany it, drive Giambrone's interest in objects as 'relics', imbued with the history of lived experience. Making reference to concealed systems of oppression, works such as Vertigo (2015) direct us to narratives of abuse and the entrenched habituation to aggression. In her sculpture and installation, beds, chairs and other pieces of furniture become instruments of repression; 'ghost-objects', that attest to an archaeological approach to the domestic that the artist has pursued from 2012 on. A traditional Persian carpet in Campo di Battaglia (Battleground, 2017) for example, features a burnt-out centre, its cavity covered by dried flowers and gunpowder, while in Untitled with Thorns (2017), two armchairs appear engulfed and conjoined by a transparent, cloud-like form, a tangle of thorns visible inside. 'They tell us something we don't want to see', Giambrone has remarked, '…sculpture is very important for this: to transform and make things unfamiliar'. [1]

 

In her extensive 'Mirrors' series (2018-), Giambrone explores the politics of the gaze through large, gilded mirror frames, infilled with wax and partially embedded acacia thorns. Taken from the Acacia Spinosa, a plant common to the artist's native Sicily, their thorns carry associations to the 'wild' and the 'sacred'; realms beyond the safely familiar or controlled. Refusing our reflection, transformed into objects that 'betray', Giambrone's mirrors interrogate the idealisation of beauty and its role within patriarchal society, themes culminating in her large-scale installation La Galleria delle Ombre (Hall of Shadows, 2021), commissioned by Dior for the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

 

Silvia Giambrone was born in Agrigento, Sicily in 1981. She participated in the 10^th Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2015). She has exhibited at PAC padiglione arte contemporanea, Project Room, Milan (2023); Palace of Versailles (2021, commissioned by Mariagrazia Chiuri for Dior FW2021); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2020); Museo Novecento, Florence (2020); Museo Alto Garda, Trento, Italy (2014), Villa Medici, Rome (2014) and MAR Museum, Ravenna, Italy (2013). She has won numerous awards including Best Short Film, Tokyo Film Award (2023); Main Prize, Kaunas Biennale, Lithuania (2013); Epson Prize, Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice (2009) and Young Artist Award, Agnelli Foundation, Turin (2008).