Who’s next?… Vera Pagava

by Valentina Biondini, art and literature amateur

The Great Suburb, 1953

Vera Pagava (1907-1988) was the first Georgian female artist to gain recognition in the European art world. She was a well-rounded artist, devoted herself to drawing, decoration, and especially painting over the course of a fifty years career. She emigrated to Europe with her family in the 1920s, shortly before Georgia’s annexation by the Soviet Union. First, she settled in Germany and then in Paris, where she remained for the rest of her life, while maintaining strong ties to her homeland. Read more

Who’s next?… Alberto Martini

by Valentina Biondini, art and literature amateur

Vanitas with self-portrait, 1920

Alberto Martini was an Italian artist with many talents who strongly influenced the imagination of his own and the following era. Today his fame is almost exclusively relegated to the lovers of fantastic art, but actually Martini was also a symbolist painter, a precursor of Surrealism, as well as an illustrator of literary texts with a precise and refined line. It is no coincidence that in London, on the occasion of his exhibition in 1914, he was nicknamed “Italian pen-and-ink genius”. As an illustrator, he created images combined with texts by Dante Alighieri and Luigi Pulci, but also by Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare, the poems of Paul Verlaine and the work “Poemetti in prosa” by Mallarmé. Read more

Who’s next?… Nori de’ Nobili

by Valentina Biondini, art and literature amateur

Nori de’ Nobili, self-portrait

Nori (Eleonora) de’ Nobili is a painter and poet originatig of Marche, who spent half of her life in a mental hospital. Nori, the eldest of four children, was born in Pesaro in 1902 in a very wealthy family with whom she used to spend her childhood summers at the beautiful house known as “Villa Centofinestre” in Ripe, a small town in the province of Ancona. Read more

Elisa Zadi/The pictorial act as a search for truth and beauty

by Romina Ciulli and Carole Dazzi

Bruciare illusioni, PicNic (2023)

The portrait, and the self-portrait, are the forms with which the artist Elisa Zadi investigates the bond between man and nature. A research that ranges from painting to installation, from performance to poetry, and that through an intimate and introspective path focuses on issues related to femininity, identity, and knowledge. In her works the human figure stands out in all its frank and refined frontality, giving life to a narrative that is not only pictorial, but above all anthropological and existential. Thus emerges a spontaneous and suggestive creative act, often represented through the fragmented idea of polyptychs, where the images seem to make use of a symbolic connotation to reflect on the complexity and fleetingness of everyday reality and human relationships. Read more

Who’s next?… Franz Sedlaceck

by Valentina Biondini, art and literature amateur

La biblioteca, 1939

What is the definition of irony for a calamity visionary as I have been defined? Dying? Or worse, disappearing mysteriously in one of the military campaigns conducted during what was, in fact, one of the bloodiest calamities in human history, the Second World War? But let’s go in order. My name is Franz Sedlacek and, rightly or wrongly, I was one of the main Austrian artists active between the two world wars.

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