ANITA ARTURA AGRESTA

Born in Palermo, 1981. She moves to Naples and attends the Academy of Fine Arts, where she gains her degree in Visual Arts and Performing Arts, and a Master in Graphics. During her formation, from 2003 to 2010, she participates, in collaboration with other local artists, in the collective experience of Naban, an art group dedicated to the realization of a series of artistic and cultural events (performances, installation, painting) in the regional area. She is concerned particularly with visual arts and proceeds her activity individually, experimenting with other technical languages. Her first solo exhibition, in 2014 at the Galleria Essearte in Naples, is called “Sew Up”. She also participated in group exhibition in Naples, Mantova, Bologna, Roma, Reggio Emilia. She lives and works in Naples.   Concept “I think dreamlike images are like seeds sprout, which translate codes through their proliferation during the sleep” The general aim of my research is to analyse and understand the emotional layers and the psychic formations, both individual and collective, and their evocative potential that expresses in (self)representative drives and sensations. My artistic aim is to propose multiple approaches and alternative interpretative possibilities. With the use of different expressive tools (painting, drawing, installation, photography) and a specific study of the diverse, even therapeutic, possibilities of colors and cromatic expressions, I tend to recover in the materiality of the artworks the memories, allucinations, fantasies, imaginations and dream images interlaced with everyday “real” experience, suggesting an intrinsic relationship between reality and dream, stability and metamorphoses, individual and collective.     Self-Portrait Paintings   “I see the self-portrait as a performative action, whish is yet unable to represent the self”   The series of paintings, “Self-Portrait”, is constituted of three groups: self-portrait (10 paintings), self-portrait dressed (17 paintings), and self-portrait naked (10 paintings). The act of self-representing is a repeated exercise, a continual proof, without possibility of stable definition and conclusion. Self-portraiture is an organic process of dismemberment and re-membering, recomposed and sewed up through the paintings, conveying some elements of my personality, in the infinite attempt to self-representation. A general trait in my artworks is the presence of some archetypical and symbolic figures such as: the breast, the hemmed dress, the crutch, just to name a few. These elements are connected to the private immaginary and assume a narrative function in the series of paintings.