Elisa Montessori

Born in Genova, 1931. Lives and works in Rome.

Since the 1950s Elisa Montessori began resorting to a range of different expressive forms and styles, in a minimal register somewhere between pure abstraction and figurative evocation, without ever falling into the wake of a particular trend, movement or fashion.
Montessori’s research has always oscillated between the Western and Eastern traditions, taking the esoteric and hidden side of the East and placing it in relation with the cultural fertility of the West.
From her statement that “working for me is a desire to delete”, Montessori has continued to produce drawings and photographs based on the concept of accumulation and subtraction, in order to illustrate the ‘wounds’ and allegations generated by society in reference to female sexuality.
An artist of many visions, Montessori’s works communicate above all her examination of the deep relation that binds woman to nature, intended as a moment of transformation, of metamorphosis.
Mythological tales and parallels with literary texts derive from a privileged channel that the artist has with literature and poetry, so that Montessori’s works accompany the viewer along a
harmonious journey of the mind – a never finished promenade through the landscape of the world’s memory and of emotions. In particular we will introduce two paintings and a selection of works on paper that illustrates well the influence of traditional Eastern landscape painting on the artist’s research in the Eighties and Nineties. Soft lines develop on the paper in a crescendo of overlapping layers where small figurines – mostly objects inspired by the feminine world – crop up.
A tangle of shimmering gold, red and cobalt reflections, simple pencil outlines from which bedroom
slippers chamber, the outline of mountains, paintbrushes or vases appear.
‘Elisa Montessori has discreetly walked her own path through the course of Italian art history with admirable integrity and coherence. Each of her works is a multifaceted, personal and relational itinerary that begins with a hint of a gesture which is able to unleash a series of events and thoughts. Her poetic is a relentless excavation, her hands and eyes brimming with physical and mental experiences in search of a connection between mankind and the world, highlighting the consciousness that art is sacred regardless of religion, occupying a frontier zone that opens a “Door into the Dark” (Seamus Heaney). Elisa Montessori is an artist who lives in the world around her, observing it, carving at its surface, translating it into a spectrum of signs that tell us there is never just one interpretation of what lies before us. And that a picture always poses a question, that it is open to the gaze of other, that seeing one thing always means finding another.’

(from Ilaria Gianni critical text for the exhibition Each thing is another, 2016, Monitor Rome)