Mirella Bentivoglio biography
- MIRELLA BENTIVOGLIO ARTIST
Mirella Bentivoglio it was aItalian artist, sculptor, poet, critic, performer and curator as well as founder of verb-visual search in Italy and in the world.
Born in Klagenfurt (Austria) in 1922 of Italian parents, his father Bertarelli was a scientist at the University of Pavia. He spent his childhood 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 as well.
The rest of his life is spent living and working in Rome, but often traveling for passion and for work. She became a true icon of artistic femininity of her time, admired and in demand all over the world, and where she wasn't directly sought, she came with a whirlwind of ideas.
In 1949 she married the law professor and writer Ludovico Matteo Bentivoglio, whose surname she decided of her own free will to assume and keep. Together they have three daughters, but the artist is widowed 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 word and image, 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 world's artistic neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century, even becoming its protagonist. She shares the ideals of the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, but her activism never goes beyond the contours of her books and her written and visual works.
He collaborates with various and numerous compatriots 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 O Visual poetry, conjugating and associating words and images, letters and visions more freely or according to certain patterns. The female presence is so preponderant that to this day it has become a real point of reference for genre art.
Initially Mirella Bentivoglio devoted herself to poetry, her initial collections such as Garden and others that are published by Scheiwiller. After approaching art criticism, in 1968 she obtained the qualification to teach Aesthetics and Art History in Italian Academies.
Starting in the 60s he moved towards a personal form of object-poetry, while from the 70s onwards he gradually expands his performances up to action poetry and to environmental poetry.
His verb-visual research consists in the creation of real linguistic artistic interventions on various types of objects. An example of this is the work 'Over go', a simple sentence, a short poem on a small marble square made in 1995. Le Litolattine instead they are made entirely of metal in 1998.
Mirella Bentivoglio's inspiration also passes through canvas and sculpture. How to forget The Egg of Gubbio, l'Upside down tree and the Book-field.
Among the poems to remember absolutely Cage, The heart of the obedient consumer It is I love you. The concept-object-word 'egg' in particular is displayed and used by Mirella Bentivoglio as an archetype, we could say, of the creation of the whole and a symbol of origin. It is no coincidence that we have many themed works, in addition to the already famous one, such as Operation Orpheus (The Egg in the Cave), From egg to zero, Hyper Ovum, The seed of or.
Ultimately we can say that yours is a game with language and objects and with the fragmentation and displacement of both. A fragmentation of the very rules of art.