Until March 24, 2024, it will be possible to visit Mariella Bettineschi: All in One, an exhibition that traces four groups of works created by the artist from Brescia between 1980 and 2023. A true journey through some seasons of the artist’s career that cannot be encapsulated in a linear definition. The exhibition, sponsored by Dior and institutional partners such as Lavazza Group and Salone del Mobile.

Mariella Bettineschi’s poetics draw from the capacity for experimentation and language rather than her own body or that of other women. The observer is led to reflections on art history and the role of women through sculpture, painting, and photography. Morbidi and Piumari are some of the series exhibited on the second floor of La Triennale, organza padded with cotton or feathers, decorated with words in cast gold or quilted in chenille, nylon thread, or metal and beads. I Tesori, instead, are glossy papers that become material through a specific process of tar, turpentine, and layers of hot-poured golden pigments. There is also L’era successiva, a series that Bettineschi started in 2008 concurrently with experimenting with the photographic doubling of nature, libraries, and female portraits. This is the moment when the artist shifts attention from the present to dedicate herself to the future. The theme of this series remains the subversion of time through the sliding of a timeless dimension where ‘there are no relationships between the living because everything is phenomenological and eternal,’ as stated in the curatorial text written by Paola Ugolini.

Mariella Bettineschi’s images hover between reality and imagined worlds, far from corporeality, entirely excluded from her formal research. It all turns towards interiority, and this perceptual shift is nothing but what characterizes the artist. For example, the gaze of Bia de’ Medici by Bronzino – through Bettineschi’s intervention – is reactualized and decontextualized. All of this captures our attention and prompts us to question the idea we have of women today, centuries away from Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Veronese, and even Bronzino.