CLAUDIA LOSI

November 23, 2001 - January 26, 2002

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Press Release

CLAUDIA LOSI23 November 2001 - 26 January 2002 In the Project Room we are showing an installation by Claudia Losi called Dopo il Danubio/le carpe del marcato/guardano gambe (After the Danube/The carp in the market/Look at legs) which consists of ten soft "carps" 180cm long, sewn out of army blankets and stuffed with wool and rags; aswell as five embroidered drawings representing carps. The works are inspired by the huge carps the artist saw in a Belgrade market in 1998. For her they have become the symbol of the sense of suffocation and impotence that she felt in the streets of Belgrade in that particular period. Claudia Losi was born in Piacenza in 1971. Her work is strongly influenced by her experiences of nature, her relationship to natural sciences and to the flow of time. Slowness and handling are important elements in her work and are knowingly set against contemporary reality. For this reason embroidery is one of her preferred techniques. She used it in 1995 to create Licheni, barbed threads sewn onto untreated fabric and representing vegetable organisms. They were a kind of synthesis of landscapes and insular maps, microcosms in which the sense of the coexistence of different layers of time becomes physical. In 1997 she began her series of Ciottoli: here the fabric support, embroidered over with images taken from prehistoric art, seemed to be stones with all their irregularity and harshness. Besides these works aimed at exploring microcosms, Losi also created pieces about the earth's geography and geology. At times she embroidered maps of ice caps, at others the continental shifts that led to the actual formation of the earth's crust. Claudia Losi was born in 1971 in Piacenza where she lives and works. In 1996, together with the poets Francesco Benozzi and Matteo Meschiari, she co-founded the Studio Italiano di Geopoetica. In the summer of 1998 she was selected to participate in the advanced programme of visual art at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como where she followed a course taught by Hamish Fulton.