Mariella Simoni

Mariella Simoni began working in Italy in the 1970s. Her art, endowed with great presence and evincing a direct relation to place and memory, rapidly attracted attention throughout Italy and Europe. Soon, she was opposing image and projection with painting and drawing. During the years that followed, the place of the object became the great subject of negotiation for anyone working with painting. Mariella Simoni resisted the tendency to trivialize painting and, entering the 1980s, she and a handful of fellow artists in Milan stuck to an oblique approach when the great majority of their fellows were either turning out very direct, literal painting or barricading themselves behind the rigor of Conceptualism.

Mariella Simoni is a prophetic artist, a painter of infinite movement and consoling thought. At a time when the world seems to be collapsing on all sides, her work rises up before us and gently holds the gaze before the final horizon.