Mirella Bentivoglio biography
Mirella Bentivoglio
Mirella Bentivoglio was an Italian artist, sculptor, poet, critic, performer, and curator as well as the founder of visual-verbal research in Italy and worldwide. She was born in Klagenfurt (Austria) in 1922 to Italian parents; her father Bertarelli was a scientist at the University of Pavia. She spent her childhood years in Milan, while studying in the German-speaking part of 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 international education that she later perfectly expressed in her artworks.
She spent the rest of her life 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 sought after worldwide, and where they did not look for her directly, she arrived with a whirlwind of ideas.
In 1949 she married the professor, legal expert, and writer Ludovico Matteo Bentivoglio, whose surname she voluntarily decided to take and keep. Together they had three daughters, but the artist was widowed in 1980.
The innovative idea of combining images with words was a continuous pursuit, taken up and revolutionized by Italian Futurism, which had already used and dared to combine word and image, but rejected everything feminine. But the years of Futurism have passed, and Mirella Bentivoglio adds a feminine touch (but not necessarily feminist) to her artworks, skillfully joining the global artistic neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century, even becoming a protagonist of them. She shares the ideals of the feminism of the Sixties and Seventies, but her activism never really goes beyond the boundaries of her books and her written and visual artworks.
She collaborates with various and numerous national and international female artists, always with extremely successful experiments.
Her artwork, from the beginning and in her own words, aims to unite words and letters giving life to the so-called Concrete Poetry or Visual Poetry, freely combining and associating words and images, letters and visions either more freely or according to certain schemes. The female presence is so predominant that it has become to this day a true point of reference for gender artwork.
Initially, Mirella Bentivoglio dedicates herself to poetry, her early collections like Garden and others published by Scheiwiller. After approaching art criticism, in 1968 she obtained qualification to teach Aesthetics and Art History in Italian Academies.
Starting from the '60s, she moves towards a personal form of poetry-object, while from the '70s onwards she gradually expands her performances up to action poetry and environmental poetry.
Her verbo-visual research consists of creating true linguistic artistic interventions on various types of objects. An example is the artwork "Beyond Going", a simple phrase, a short poem on a small square of marble made in 1995. The Little Cans are instead made entirely of metal in 1998.
Mirella Bentivoglio's flair also extends to canvas and sculpture. How can we forget The Egg of Gubbio, the Upside-Down Tree and the Field-Book.
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 origin. Not by chance, we have many themed artworks, beyond the already famous cited one, such as Operation Orpheus (The Egg in the Cave), From Egg to Zero, Hyper Ovum, The Seed of O.
Ultimately, we can say that hers is a game with language and objects and with the fragmentation and displacement of both. A fragmentation of the very rules of artwork.