You have a week to see Martina Merlini’s recent solo exhibition “Wax” at the Elastico center in Bologna Italy. The exhibition runs until Jan 11th. Martina who also is known for her mural work was in residence creating a range of work from fabric, installation, prints on wood and paper. Wax is an ambitious exhibition that displays the artist’s strengths utilizing the printing process in the work. The textures created against strong contrasts build a perfect mark for her deconstructed geometry. Forms that are whole yet broken. The Wax used to create some of work creates an imperfect mark, yet bold saturation in its absence. Overall an impressive exhibition from Martina that we hope you are able to see before it ends, and if you are not near Bologna we offer these pictures from the exhibit. Enjoy!
GF
“WAX” Solo Exhibition from Martina Merlini
Initially centered on the illustration, more and more, in recent years, the artistic career of Martina Merlini multiformemente winds in the wake of the exploration, involving a variety of techniques, materials and media that converge in the search for a formal balance delicately built on ‘ harmony of geometric and abstract elements. Wax – staff hosted in Elastic Studio from December 13 2013 to 11 January 2014 – is a kind of snapshot that fixes the latest developments in this evolution, linking works ranging from the works on fabric, paper and wood installation, up to the painting on the wall.
The exhibition is developed in a radial pattern around a large installation that takes shape vertically from ceiling to floor, scoring ideally not only the center of the exhibition space, but also the center of gravity of the Earth. Composed by drapes of fabric hand-dyed, some of which are surmounted by screen printing, it identifies its core in “Totem”, a work done in woodcut during a recent artist residency at Officine printing.
The encounter with this technique has been the catalyst for the new location of the author’s research, which is configured as an attempt to broaden the concept of texture of its wood made through the use of other techniques. It is in fact the wax, in this case, to circumscribe an unpublished testing ground, within which develop geometric images that mimic perfectly the yield of the print with arrays of wood; such research is concreted in a series of works on paper and wood of various sizes (35×50, 150×100, 20×30 cm).
Upon completion of the exhibition will also feature a ‘work on the wall, consonant with the rest of the corpus of the pieces on display both from the point of view of the use of color from that of the choice of the dominant themes, explicit reference to the location within street art that Martina is carrying out in recent years.
