The paths of Mirella Bentivoglio

The exhibition dedicated to Mirella Bentivoglio and set up at the Galleria DeniArte in Rome.

On display one of the symbolic objects of the artist, the marble book, the ties of the installation Lapidi a Hravat and the asphalt and asphalt crusts of the series Road books.

Particularly captivating is the choice of materials among marbles of different textures and colors, from Europe and other continents: smooth, lumpy, homogeneous, streaked. 

Tombstone in Hravat plays on the ambiguity of meaning and the shift of meaning: it alludes to the etymology of the Croatian word hravat, which means "to strangle" and to the use that Croatian soldiers made of a handkerchief worn around the neck as an instrument of death. The tie also refers in a sinister way to the mafia and slang language, in which "put on a tie" and "make a tie" refer to the practice of usury. At the same time, however, the tie is also a symbol of respectability and elegance in the contemporary clothing of Western men.

To understand the meaning of these works it is necessary to remember that Mirella Bentivoglio began her artistic career as a poetess and that, in the second half of the 1960s, noting the insufficiency of verbal language, she began to play with its basic elements, isolating words from the sentence. , syllables and single letters, presented simply in their iconic image or replicated and combined variously, together with real images and objects.

It is a poetic aimed at overcoming the boundaries of language through its materialization, without any pretense of revealing anything, but waiting for the visitor to discover its essence himself.