On Saturday, December 11, the gallery z2o Sara Zanin (Rome) inaugurated the first solo exhibition of the artist Marta Roberti, In metamorfosi, curated by Cecilia Canziani.

The exhibition brings together two series of works made on Yunnan paper and heavily contaminated by the relations between East and West that characterize the artist’s research.

The title of the first, s’io mi intuassi come tu t’inmii, is a verse from Dante’s Divina Commedia (Paradiso IX, 81), which according to the artist can perfectly express the idea of metamorphosis that is at the center of all the works. The animals that populate the three canticles of the Commedia are the starting point for a feminine reworking of mythological and zoomorphic creatures, whose iconography is rethought by the artist starting from itself, proposing a series of self-portraits, and merging them with ancient languages taken from the Greeks and the Etruscans.

The idea of metamorphosis also characterizes the second series of works, Lotus goddesses: reinventions of female Indian deities flanked by symbolic and ambiguous animal figures. “Myths are stories that never happened but are always” (Ovidio), there is something strong in the stories that connects with certain parts of our inner world, and it can always communicate with us.

The principle that oversees these two cycles is the same that generally regulates the work of Marta Roberti and has its roots in multiplicity and trust in transformation and growth. Her drawings, obtained through the use of copying paper, which is the matrix or body of the work and which always generates a design and its double, can be assembled and reassembled generating vast possibilities of combinations.

The limit of the image is never defined: it is the image itself that decides the extension of the support and not vice versa.

Sofia Zin

Info:

Marta Roberti. In metamorfosi
11/12/2021 – 05/02/2022
z2o Sara Zanin
Via della Vetrina, 21 Roma