BOLOGNA.- Luisa Gardini is the featured artist of the new exhibition promoted and organized by the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna. The exhibition, curated by Cecilia Canziani and Ilaria Gianni, will be open to the public free of charge from January 31 to March 8, 2025, at Palazzo Paltroni, via delle Donzelle 2, Bologna (Italy).
Discover the captivating art of Luisa Gardini! Explore her unique artistic journey, from early works to her signature layered creations, in this comprehensive book.
With the solo exhibition Luisa Gardini. The Same Voice but Not the Same Song, the Fondazione del Monte presents for the first time in an institutional venue in Italy the work of Luisa Gardini (born in Ravenna in 1935, lives and works in Rome), continuing a series of exhibitions focusing on the poetics and practices of female artists born or active in the Emilia-Romagna region. These artists belong to a generation that received late recognition despite an uninterrupted dedication to research and studio practice.
Active since the late 1950s, after studying at the Liceo Artistico in Ravenna, Luisa Gardini moved to Rome to attend the Accademia di Belle Arti. Her early career was shaped by daily interactions with Toti Scialoja and the young artists attending his courses in Via Ripetta, her discovery of American art, Arshile Gorky and Jasper Johns, as well as Action Painting—particularly through the Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome—and her dialogue with Cy Twombly.
Gardini’s early works focused on childlike marks, represented in the exhibition by two pieces on paper from 1958. During the 1960s, she developed an interest in montage: her paintings and, more prominently, her sculptures were composed of found objects and fragments of everyday life—newspaper clippings, clothing, pieces of wood, boxes—elements that time would otherwise discard if not reassembled into form by the artist. Drawing has always been an integral part of her practice, as shown by studies from the mid-1960s and a collection of works on paper from the early 1970s. While these drawings suggest forms explored in her sculptures, they maintain their own autonomy.
Her first solo exhibition, introduced by Scialoja, took place in 1981. Before this, Gardini’s work appeared in group exhibitions, including From Page to Space: Women in the Italian Avant-Garde Between Language and Image, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio at the Center for Italian Studies at Columbia University in New York.
In a 2020 review by Laura Gamberini for Artribune, Gardini, when asked what she had been doing in the years between earning her diploma and her first exhibitions, replied, “I had been working.” Her studio remains the place where her art not only takes shape but also evolves, weaving connections across different facets of her research.
In the 1980s, her characteristic mark-making became denser, with canvases and papers covered in charcoal strokes that explore the surface, sometimes ending in erasure, creating space, speeding up, or slowing down. Watercolor works from the same period introduced a wider colour palette beyond her usual whites, blacks, and reds. During the 1990s, her focus on material deepened, resulting in works balanced between sculpture and painting: surfaces layered with colour and kaolin, created through the accumulation of diverse strata, almost resembling bas-reliefs.
Sculpture returned in the early 2000s, with ephemeral forms previously seen in the 1970s now modelled in ceramics. Her collaboration with the Gatti workshop in Faenza provided an opportunity to reinterpret painterly gestures in sculptural terms, revisit montage through assembled shapes, experiment with material reactions, and incorporate photographic fragments into her sculptures using photoceramics.
Her recent works are characterized by a renewed use of paper as her material of choice, with marks deposited on small sheets layered into compositions resembling scales. A striking feature of these pieces is her use of a vibrant, lively red, which seems to expand beyond the often modest dimensions of the works.
The exhibition at Palazzo Paltroni spans the entirety of Gardini’s career, showcasing—through works sometimes presented to the public for the first time—a daily studio practice that stretches from the late 1950s to the present. Structured around resonances between gestures, marks, and recurring images in her poetics, The Same Voice but Not the Same Song brings the artist’s relationship with drawing as writing, sculpture as assemblage, collage as association, and painting as object back into focus. Each work represents a stratification of materials that reappear decade after decade in ever-evolving interpretations— “the same voice but not the same song,” indeed—through dialogues, juxtapositions, and accumulations.
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