Portfolio is one of the two exhibition cycles of the program Quotidiana at the Museo di Roma- Palazzo Braschi conceived and produced by La Quadriennale di Roma in collaboration with Roma Culture, Rome’s Superintendency for Cultural Heritage. Its aim is to explore a number of significant trends in 21st-century Italian art.
Once a month, eleven artists under the age of 35 are presented in the exhibition with a single work. Their research is narrated in a portfolio developed by the Curator-in-residence at La Quadriennale.
The fifth exhibition of Portfolio (19 January – 12 February 2023) is dedicated to Martina Biolo (Padua, 1996). Martina Biolo’s artistic practice extrapolates domestic objects from their everyday dimension, through a sculptural transformation process capable of accentuating their precious character. This also means granting these objects durability — and amplifying the persistent memories which they keep alive.
Biolo’s work is an attempt to get a handle on the unstable relationship between human beings and the objects of their everyday existence. It thus has to do with an everyday dimension made up of the amnesias and oversights that lead things into progressive disuse. To consult his portfolio read here.
Tana (2020) is a sculptural work in which the artist reproduces the cushions from the sofa of her childhood home, arranging them in the manner of the shelters built by children to hide and create a protective space within the walls of the home. Martina Biolo uses latex almost like a fabric, emphasising its material characteristics, which are very similar to those of human skin. This resemblance is accentuated by the haematomas reproduced by the artist on the surface of the material, which draw it closer to an organic, corporeal and sensual dimension.
The work appears as a relic of a past to which the artist’s body remains symbolically and materially attached, and which records its traumas and lived experience. In this regard, Biolo tells of how her works often have the value of “spectres” — attempts to bring into view something that insistently presses from the past in order to assert its persistence in the present.
The exhibition venue is the Museo di Roma-Palazzo Braschi (Piazza di San Pantaleo, 10/Piazza Navona, 2).
Admission free without reservation. Opening hours: from Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 – 19.00.
