Reperti | Chiara Valentini

Chiara Valentini’s solo exhibition at the Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum takes its cue from the atelier house that the Norwegian naturalized American artist designed and had built between 1922 and 1925. Today the museum, in addition to exhibiting sculptural, pictorial and graphic works, is also the archive of a great utopian and symbolic project, the World Center of Communication, whose lofty human ideals of brotherhood and mutual cooperation seem today almost ‘relics’ from the past. Memory and the relationship with the past are the leitmotif of the exhibition project by Chiara Valentini, an eclectic artist born in 1981 who, confronting the work and biography of the Norwegian sculptor, recovers and reinterprets the traces left behind, inviting each of us to re-weave the threads that connect the past to the present. 

Thus, the museum hosts a dialogue between past and present, between traditional sculpture and contemporary vision. Chiara Valentini’s half-busts and full-length sculptures are inspired by classical iconography (the Laocoon, Aphrodite Cnidia) but any monumentality is annulled by the use of soft and perishable fabrics, cut and torn and then reassembled, of seemingly fragile materials. At the same time, fabric and embroidery, historically associated with the female expressive universe, proudly mark and emphasize an identity and otherness in a world still dominated by male figures. In contrast, Andersen’s imposing sculptures, inspired by the models of Greek and Renaissance statuary, communicate openness and lightness despite the weight of the material, either plaster or bronze. And they articulate an equal dialogue between the masculine and the feminine, where men and women stride with equal stride, in a condition of equality and shared purpose.