The Agenda of the Week’s Exhibitions
Silvia Airoldi, Elle Decor
September 2023
The Nivola Museum hosts the first large retrospective of Bona de Mandiargues . An artist and writer who has not been fully explored to date, de Mandiargues, along with other protagonists such as Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, to name a few, falls within the scope of a female surrealism that is finally being explored and re-evaluated. The artist’s work is based on a search for the self that is expressed through the themes of metamorphosis, animal totemism and the fantastic, in showing a divided and fragmented identity. Explicitly rejecting the roles of woman-muse and woman-child that dominated Surrealism, de Mandiargues identifies herself, starting in the 1970s, with the snail, a hermaphroditic animal and ambivalent figure, the incarnation of the surrealist formlessness. For the artist, the snail is a symbol of androgyny, fragility and strength, and of the constant torment of her restless mind. The exhibition project, curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, Luca Cheri and Caterina Ghisu, which is the result of careful archive research, retraces the artistic path of Bona de Mandiargues by presenting a selection of 71 works created between 1950 and 1997.