Artist: Luisa Gardini
Exhibition title: Durata (2011-2024)
Venue: Ermes Ermes, Rome, Italy
Date: September 27 – November 15, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Ermes Ermes, Rome
Throughout her career spanning over fifty years, Luisa Gardini’s artistic language has evolved through a grammar of signs, materials, and forms, continuously reshaped and manipulated to create spontaneous associations and authentic images. From her debut in the 1950s to her most recent works, her oeuvre is marked by an intimate, free, and intuitive selection and combination of diverse materials.
From an early age, Gardini nurtured a passion for music, particularly jazz improvisation, while also progressively exploring the creative rhythms of Italian classical composers such as Pergolesi and Rossini. Much like musical scores built around various movements and tempos — grave, adagio, rapid — her paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures emerge from a mark-making process devoid of explicit semantic meaning and from the dense layering of materials. In her sculptures and assemblages, paper, textiles, and a wide range of surfaces — ranging from light as paper to weighty as bronze — acquire new dimensions, claiming their space and time with renewed corporeality. Engaging with the experimental practices that shaped the Avant-Garde movements throughout the 20th century, Gardini’s body of work unfolds like a diary of quick annotations and intuitions, serving as a testament to her presence in the world and her belonging to the here and now. Her works function as resonating chambers, where gestures produce harmonious and dissonant interactions between materials and objects that, like living bodies, assert their place within everyday life. In this way, she crafts images and forms infused with a distinctive sensuality, emanating from the matter itself as it evolves and alters its original features.
Through close-ups of anatomical details—hands, nails, lips—traced illegible signs, and textured surfaces primarily in monochrome, Gardini expresses her creative freedom and curiosity about the fate of forms and objects, which sometimes vanish and other times resurface. A poetics of fragmentation and improvisation subtly permeates her recent works. Like notes in the margins, the works on display offer a glimpse into Gardini’s production from 2011 to 2024. The artist presents newly created works alongside others developed over a longer period, pieces she has continually refined over the years. Today, these works represent her persistent return to form and matter, embodying an ongoing potential for metamorphosis, ultimately recording the duration and unpredictable unfolding of inner time.
Luisa Gardini (b. 1935, Ravenna), lives and works in Rome.
Selected solo and group exhibitions: 2024, Luisa Gardini – Beatrice Bonino, presented by Ermes Ermes at Paris Internationale, Paris, FR (upcoming); Luisa Gardini, solo presentation by Ermes Ermes at Artefiera, Bologna, IT; Fluttuazioni del visibile, Artisti fra immagini e figura, curated by Silvia Pegoraro at Galleria Marchetti, Roma; 2023, Luisa Gardini at Intermezzo Studio, Paris, FR; Luisa Gardini – Ser Serpas at MiArt, presented by Ermes Ermes in collaboration with LC Queisser, Milan, IT; 2022, Clin d’oeil with Davide Stucchi at Ermes Ermes, Rome, IT; 2018, Trimini Rising at Belmacz, London, UK; 2017, Trialogo/Rossini & Beiderbecke at Librogalleria La Diagonale, Rome, IT; Gli amici di Toti Scialoja e Gabriella Drudi at MACRO, Rome, IT; 2016, Luisa Gardini & Felix at Guimarães, Vienna, AT; Luisa Gardini at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, New York, US; 2014, To continue. Notes towards a Sculpture Cycle. Parte prima: Materia, curated by C. Canziani and I. Gianni at Nomas Foundation,
Rome, IT; Carte e sculture – Anni Settanta e Anni Duemila, curated by P. Bonani at La Diagonale, Rome, IT; 2012, Smeared with the gold of the Opulent Sun, curated by C. Sharp at Nomas Foundation, Rome, IT; 1996, Luisa Gardini (29 aprile), in Martiri e Santi at Associazione Culturale L’Attico, Rome, IT; Luisa Gardini at Ronchini Arte Contemporanea, Terni, IT; Luisa Gardini at The Voxxx. Kultur und Kommunikation Zentrum, Chemnitz, DE; 1993,
Luisa Gardini at Galleria Miralli, Viterbo, IT; 1992, Luisa Gardini. Opere recenti at Chiesa SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Spoleto, IT; 1989, Luisa Gardini. Opere recenti at Studio Durante, Rome, IT; 1988, Post scriptum. Artiste in Italia tra linguaggio e immagine negli anni ‘60 e ‘70 at Civiche Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, IT; 1984, Luisa Gardini. Opere recenti at Galleria Mèta Arte Contemporanea, Bolzano, IT; 1983, Luisa Gardini. Opere recenti at Galleria L’Isola, Rome, IT; 1981, Luisa Gardini. Opere su carta e su tela 1977-1980 at Galleria d’Arte Grafica dei Greci, Rome, IT; 1979, From page to space. Women in the Italian Avant-Garde Between Language and Image, curated by M. Bentivoglio at Center for Italian Studies – Columbia University, New York, US.
