Ilaria Margutti

Ilaria Margutti – The thread of Ananke. Written on the skin
Pretorian Palace, Barberino di Mugello, Florence
June 22 – July 23, 2013

Saturday, June the 22 at 6 pm, the exhibition space of the Praetorian Palace in Barberino di Mugello opens its doors to “The thread of Ananke. Written on the skin”, the solo exhiibition by Ilaria Margutti, one of the most talented contemporary Italian artist.

The Municipality of Barberino, which has worked for years alongside other Mugello Municipalities to support and promote contemporary art, continues its cultural proposal and offers to all the visitors from Mugello and Florence, the opportunity to meet the artistic career of Ilaria Margutti.

Ilaria Margutti is the sensitive artist from Arezzo “who has chosen the ancient art of embroidery – a female activity since the dawn of humanity – to talk about pain, healing and redemption (Adriana M. Soldini, the renowed Italian art curator).

The artist, as a modern Moira, catches the thread of Ananke, the thread of fate, and with a slow, laborious, miraculous embroidery work, further enriched by inserts of gauze and natural elements, goes to write pages of a courageous and authentic process of artistic maturation through her portraits of women’s faces and bodies.

Embroidering the skin is almost like a long and pondered work done to enrich not only the skin itself but also more properly the own inner identity. “My work – as Ilaria told in a recent interview – is a metaphor for the construction of our own identity, a construction, which starts by taking care of ourselves because it’s just when we find the courage to take care of ourselves that we can begin to do so. Embroidery becomes for me a means by which I can express myself with my feminine identity, which is not that of painting or sculpture, but that has properly to do with the origin of female creativity, which passes through the thread”.

“Weaving, embroidery, mending, sewing are all ‘actions’ symbolically linked to the ‘creation’, to generate life from expectancy.
The needle becomes an instrument of ‘creation’. “The needle is a medium, a mystery, a reality, a hermaphrodite, a barometer, a moment, and a Zen: it leaves no traces and at the end it disappears. The only one trace is the connection realized by it” (Kim Sooja). The needle is pungent, it serves to injure, as well as to patch up, close, mend, rebuild the lines of the existence.
The hands investigate the skin, recognize edges, impress furrows and mend folds. Women tirelessly make up themselves and define their forms, run through cavities and protrusions through the mouth and eyebrows, knees and navels, breasts and nails.
The artist does not heal her injuries, but goes through the fractures of the flesh to transfigure her canvases in a scar in which to shut her and have peace.
The border is the skin, weak and thin hinge between the inside and the outside”. (Taken from the critical text by Lucrezia Naglieri and Lara Carbonara).

The exhibition enriches he program of the public event “A thread of…” to be held on June 23 in Piazza Cavour in Barberino di Mugello. It’s an event dedicated to knitting and other traditionally female jobs, such as embroidery, weaving, crochet, in all their possible creative developments, from street furniture to decorative objects and artistic creation.