LETIA – Letizia Cariello
Merzbau Quantico
April 6 – July 26, 2025
Presented at Nashira Gallery from April 6 to July 26, 2025, Merzbau Quantico marked LETIA – Letizia Cariello‘s (1963) first solo exhibition with the gallery and was accompanied by a critical essay by Caroline Corbetta.
Bringing together more than twenty years of artistic research, the exhibition expanded and deepened the core themes and visual language that have long defined LETIA’s practice. Conceived as a large-scale immersive installation, Merzbau Quantico brought together, for the first time, the key elements of the artist’s distinctive vocabulary—from the Calendariand Gates to her photographic research, red ropes, and mooring bollards. The project revisited and further developed ideas explored in earlier works, from the immersive installation created for Grande Miglio in Brescia to the site-specific intervention at Fondazione Made in Cloister in Naples.
As the artist explains, Merzbau Quantico refers not only to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau and its layered construction around the idea of inhabiting the body, but also to the exploration of the fourth dimension proposed by quantum physics. Equally central is the relationship with the natural world, which Cariello describes as a “New Narnia”—or, more precisely, a “Quantum Narnia”—where vegetal elements stitched onto red ropes, bucrania, and bronze branches are reimagined through her symbolic vision. Rather than approaching nature through a primitivist lens, the artist positions herself as an integral part of it, filtering it through the inner, symbolic dimension that defines human experience.
Throughout the exhibition, presences were transformed into visions through an intricate network of red ropes that traversed and reconfigured the gallery, turning the entire space into a single immersive installation. Glimpsed among gilded palm trees, the Gates and Calendari encouraged visitors to move through the exhibition, sharpening their perception and shifting their role from passive observers to active participants in a shared experience
Merzbau Quantico, installation view, 2025, Ph: m3studio
Calendario Superiore, 2024, ink and gold embroidery on sheet mounted on round frame, Ø 80 cm, unique edition, Ph: m3studio
Una Rosa è Una Rosa – Time Machine, 2018, C-print on Hahnemühle paper with red embroidery in a structure of different woods designed by the Artist, Ø 58 cm, unique edition, Ph: m3studio
Merzbau Quantico, installation view, 2025, Ph: m3studio
