Biography

Bona de Mandiargues (b.1926, Rome; d.2000, Paris) is considered a central artist within the Surrealist movement. In recent years, de Mardiargues has been the subject of renewed curatorial interest and international recognition, following her first institutional retrospective at the Nivola Museum in Sardinia (2022). Her work is currently on view at the 60th Venice Biennale ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, curated by Adriano Pedrosa (until 24 November 2024) and ‘Surréalisme’ at Centre Pompidou, Paris (until 13 January 2025).

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De Mandiargues lived in Italy, before moving to Paris in 1947. Aged 6, her family moved from the Italian countryside to Modena. She described the move from rural surroundings to city life as traumatic, and she began to draw in response to this change in her environment. De Mandiargues went on to study at Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, where her uncle, the poet and artist Filippo de Pisis (1896-1956) became her mentor. In Venice, she was introduced to influences she carried with her throughout her career; from the early Christian mosaics of Ravenna, the late medieval and early Renaissance painting from the Sienese and Ferrarese schools, to the Surrealists including Giorgio de Chirico.

Self-fashioning as ‘Bona’, she became an important figure on the Parisian post-war cultural scene, integrating within the founder of Surrealism André Breton’s intellectual circle. Bona experimented with oil paint, textiles and found materials, using painting and assemblage to explore ideas surrounding gender, dreams, and magic. As she wrote in her 1977 autobiography Bonaventure: ‘My research is alchemical… I want to make gold starting from excrement.’1

During this period, her work took on many of the tenets of Surrealism. In her paintings, fantastic creatures populate anthropomorphic landscapes. The creative environment in Paris proved extremely fertile: ‘Thanks to the Surrealist group’ she reflected, ‘I was able to see more clearly in myself what I had been trying to express.’2

Shortly before embarking on her trip to Mexico in 1958, Bona separated from her husband, writer and poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909-1991), with whom she had a tumultuous relationship. Crowned by Breton ‘the most Surrealist country in the world’, Bona was inspired by the colours of Mexico, its pre-Columbian history, and local indigenous weaving, and entered a new artistic phase, abandoning paint in favour of fabric and collage.3

Taking scissors to her husband’s old jackets, Bona ripped out and disassembled the linings, which Italian and French tailors refer to as l’anima and l’âme (soul). The resulting collaged and sewn fabric images — which she referred to as ‘ragarts’ — read like paintings, pieced together with a sewing machine and also by hand. ‘I chose these very humble materials…I flipped inside out the vests of men to get to the heart of their armour, of their protection.’

In the work from this period, in the wake of World War II, she imagined the viewer, like her ‘ragarts’, as damaged souls, in need of restoration and care. The act of destroying an established whole — in this case a man’s jacket — and reconstituting it, mirrored Bona’s desire to rebuild the world according to her vision. As she stated, ‘an artist’s first duty is loyalty to the material; the second is the process of its transformation, so that it becomes something more by not abandoning its nature.’ By physically stitching material, Bona sought to rip apart established Western binaries, chief among them the concept of male and female; the beautiful and the savage; the spiritual and the material, fusing them into a single form.

Fundamental metaphors in Bona’s work are the snail and the eye. The spiral shell of the snail remained constant in her work, as she stated, ‘today I am a man and a woman in the same unit, I am like two forces which complete one another. The snail realises this union. Furthermore, I do not have a mind for collectivity. I am alone like a snail. I enter my shell as a whole. No one, from the outside, can see the bottom.’ Bona’s last self portrait (1994), shows eyes floating above her head, reflecting her thoughts that the artist is ‘a hand that has the eyes of its body and its soul’.


[1] Bona de Mandiargues, Bonaventure (Paris: Éditions Stock) 1977, p.231.

[2] De Mandiargues, Bonaventure, p.258.

[3] Hélène Mitayne, ‘Bona de Pisis: nella Spirale della Creazione (1950-2000)’, Letteratura Arte, no. 7, 2009.

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Works

La volta, 1951

Oil on canvas
22 x 16 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Tancredi, 1954

Oil on canvas
116 x 63 cm
Collection of Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma © Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Toro Nuziale, 1958

Assemblage
90 x 116 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Preistoria di Venezia, 1959

Mixed media on canvas
60 x 120 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Il sole, 1960

Mixed media on canvas
146 x 114 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Trittico della nascita, 1965

Collection of Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Ferrara © Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Storia di Famiglia, 1967

Oil on canvas
70 x 100 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Diana Cacciatrice e Cacciata, 1968

Assemblage
100 x 80 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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La follia di Einstein (La mia bambola), 1970

Assemblage on canvas
81 x 100 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Monsieur Tetasse, 1972

Assemblage and acrylic on canvas
73 x 60 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Ratto d’acqua della medusa, 1975

Oil on canvas
60 x 73 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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La torre della paura, 1976

Assemblage and oil on canvas
146 x 96 cm
Collection of Collezione d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Ferrara © Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Les amants / The Lovers, 1980

Assemblage and acrylic on canvas
54 x 65 cm (21 1/4 x 25 5/8 in)
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Femme escargot / Snail woman, 1983

Assemblage and acrylic on canvas
61 x 50 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Clorinda combatte le arpie, 1984

© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Uscita dall’ombra, 1989

© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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La Donna montagna, 1991

Assemblage and oil on canvas
73 x 92 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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La mia mano, 1992

Assemblage and oil on canvas
100 x 81 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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Autoritratto, 1994

Assemblage and oil on canvas
92 x 73 cm
© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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La sacra famiglia, 1997

© Estate of Bona de Mandiargues

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  • La volta, 1951
  • Tancredi, 1954
  • Toro Nuziale, 1958
  • Preistoria di Venezia, 1959
  • Il sole, 1960
  • Trittico della nascita, 1965
  • Storia di Famiglia, 1967
  • Diana Cacciatrice e Cacciata, 1968
  • La follia di Einstein (La mia bambola), 1970
  • Monsieur Tetasse, 1972
  • Ratto d’acqua della medusa, 1975
  • La torre della paura, 1976
  • Les amants / The Lovers, 1980
  • Femme escargot / Snail woman, 1983
  • Clorinda combatte le arpie, 1984
  • Uscita dall’ombra, 1989
  • La Donna montagna, 1991
  • La mia mano, 1992
  • Autoritratto, 1994
  • La sacra famiglia, 1997

Press

Bona de Mandiargues, a disturbing and visionary artist

Francesca Cogoni, RSI

June 2024

The Agenda of the Week’s Exhibitions

Silvia Airoldi, Elle Decor

September 2023

Rediscovering Bona de Mandiargues, an important surrealist whose story has never been reconstructed

Illaria Baratta, Finestre sull’ Arte: The Best of Italian Art

September 2023

Women of Surealism

Lise de Harme and Francos Ponge, The Feminist Art Journal

Spring, 1973

Books

Bonaventure

Bona de Mandiargues

1977

Surréalisme

Centre Pompidou

2024

Bona de Mandiargues. Rifare il Mondo

Allemandi

2023

News

Announcing Representation of Bona de Mandiargues

Alison Jacques will present a solo exhibition of Bona de Mandiargues’ work in 2025