Mariella Bettineschi

BIO

Born in Brescia in 1948. Lives and works in Bergamo.

Embracing with her own experimentation a wide period, which saw her first close to the Milanese feminist groups – from which she soon detached herself, sensing the risk of a homogenization of research – Bettineschi has led since the 1970s a solitary path aimed at the implementation of her own language, a new lemma through which to express her role as a woman and artist in the world.

A feminist artist, she stands out on the international scene for her continuous search for female languages capable of narrating, through painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, digital painting, the centrality of women, their infinite capacity to bring the world into being.

The use of different media, through which Bettineschi has implemented an absolutely personal formal and expressive research, underlines on the one hand, the importance ascribed to “savoir faire,” that technical expertise of academic memory that has allowed the artist, over the years, to disentangle himself from disparate tools, techniques and formal solutions to arrive at an accomplished synthesis of his own imaginative universe; on the other, a tireless research linked to that a-temporal discontinuity that makes his entire production unique in terms of the breadth of content and topoi addressed.

Participation in 1988 in the XLIII Venice Biennial at the invitation of Achille Bonito Oliva, in 1989 the move to Berlin – the city where the artist would reside until 1995, up to the success of the 2022 Dior cruise with the presentation of an immersive installation from L’era successiva, are just some of the highlights of a long and jagged artistic journey. Mariella Bettineschi (Brescia 1948) confronted, with awareness, her own role as a woman and artist even before establishing herself on the national scene, following an autonomous vocation within a markedly masculine environment: “Positioning herself at the borders, activating a hallucinated gaze, a primitive attention to things, the image arrives from the periphery, reveals itself by its “sparkle,” is unique, does not seek connections, affinities, families. […] But the image can also bifurcate, become a labyrinth: then it multiplies, swallows itself and rejects its opposite, betrays assumptions, lands in unknown outcomes,” he wrote in 1999.

Art for Bettineschi is loss and disorientation, knowledge of the world and the self, knowledge of the unspoken through the constant overcoming of conventional barriers of space and time. As from the dazzlement born for Duchamp, from the encounter with his work in Philadelphia, for Bettineschi the fourth dimension is all real: it guarantees entry into a renewed space in which the rules of the game are all to be defined. This is how a jagged and continuous narrative is born, a narrative spanning fifty years that eludes any attempt at unambiguous definition.

Art, then, coagulates a fluid state, is devoid of recognizable constants, is disorientation and loss.