Mirella Bentivoglio biography

Mirella Bentivoglio was an Italian artist, sculptor, poet, critic, performer and curator as well as the founder of verbovisual research in Italy and around the world.
He was born in Klagenfurt (Austria) in 1922 to Italian parents, his father Bertarelli was a scientist at the University of Pavia. He spent his childhood years in Milan, while completing his studies in German-speaking Switzerland and in the United Kingdom at the University of Sheffield and Cambridge until the outbreak of the Second World War, thus receiving not only a multilingual education, but also an education of international scope which he then expressed perfectly in his works.
The rest of his life was spent living and working in Rome, but often traveling for passion and work. She became a true icon of artistic femininity of her time, admired and requested all over the world, and where they didn't look for her directly, she arrived with a whirlwind of ideas.
In 1949 she married the professor, expert in law and writer Ludovico Matteo Bentivoglio, whose surname she decided of her own free will to take on and keep. Together they have three daughters, but the artist became a widow in 1980.
The innovative idea of ​​combining images with words was a continuous research, taken up and revolutionized by Italian Futurism, which had already used and dared to combine words and images, but which shunned everything feminine. But the years of Futurism have passed, and Mirella Bentivoglio combines a feminine (but not necessarily feminist) touch to her works, masterfully joining the global artistic neo-avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century, even becoming its protagonist. She shares the ideals of the feminism of the Sixties and Seventies, but her activism never goes far beyond the boundaries of her books and her written and visual works.
She collaborates with various and numerous compatriot and international artists, always with extremely successful experiments.
His art, from the beginning and from his own words, wants to unite words and letters giving life to the so-called Concrete Poetry orVisual Poetry, combining and associating more freely or according certain patterns words and images, letters and visions. The female presence is so preponderant that it has become a real point of reference for gender art to this day.
Initially Mirella Bentivoglio dedicated herself to poems, her initial collections such as Giardino and others which were published by Scheiwiller. After having approached art criticism, in 1968 she obtained the qualification to teach Aesthetics and Art History in Italian Academies.
Starting from the '60s he moved towards a personal form of object-poetry, while from the '70s onwards he gradually expanded his performances up to action poetry and to environmental poetry.
His verbo-visual research consists in the creation of real artistic interventions of a linguistic nature on objects of various types. An example of this is the work 'Oltre go', a simple sentence, a short poem on a small square of marble created in 1995. The Litolattine are instead made entirely of metal in 1998.
Mirella Bentivoglio's creativity also passes through canvas and sculpture. How can we forget The Egg of Gubbio, the Upside Down Tree and the Book-field.
Among the poems to absolutely remember are Cage, The heart of the obedient consumer and I love you. The concept-object-word 'egg' in particular is showcased and used by Mirella Bentivoglio as an archetype, we could say, of the creation of everything and a symbol of the origin. It is no coincidence that we have many themed works, in addition to the already famous one mentioned, such as Operation Orpheus (The egg in the cave), From egg to zero, Hyper Ovum, The seed of o.
Ultimately we can say that his is a game with language and objects and with the fragmentation and displacement of both. A fragmentation of the very rules of art.