Petra Weiss. Beauty exists

Artist Petra Weiss began her career working with ceramics, then moved on to explore the primordial elements linked to nature: earth, water, air and fire in their material evolution, finally arriving, in the course of her artistic research, at a more minimalist, essential and geometric phase. The exhibition dedicated to her traces her creative journey, illustrating how the artist has realised her personal vision of beauty as a harmonious and evocative image. From her early production of “cubes” and “piles”, hieratic sculptures that evoke primordial memories, she moved on to “pyramids” and “jagged steles”, porous vertical clods, and “steles”, vertical slabs of painted metal. The next phase is characterised by split spheres called “meteors”, which bring to mind unknown worlds and universes of infinite constellations. From terracotta, Petra Weiss moved on to creating sophisticated glazed stoneware and polychrome ceramics, then to working with marno and bronze. The artist has created numerous glazed ceramic works for public and private buildings, including a large mural relief (11 x 28 m) completed between 1990 and 1992 for the University Hospital of Zurich. In 2002, the Ticino artist also explored the theme of writing and proposed events combining sculpture, dance and music in urban or natural spaces (D’improvviso in Milan in 2003 and the cycle entitled L’alfabeto della terra 2003-2004). In 2008-2009, he worked with Arzo marble and Riva San Vitale clay. The collection of poems Poche parole per dire (A Few Words to Say) was published in 2003 by Edizioni Ulivo; in 2007, Pagine d’Arte published Il viaggio dell’alfabeto (The Journey of the Alphabet), a diary of his experiences from 2000 to 2007 on the adventurous journey undertaken with his complex sculpture L’alfabeto (The Alphabet). This was followed by numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her works can be found in museums and public and private collections in Switzerland and abroad. Spazio Officina houses some sixty works in ceramic, stoneware, marble, bronze and glass that document Petra Weiss’s important research into materials over fifty years of intense activity. The exhibition includes the installation of a permanent sculpture in the “sculpture park” behind the museum. Her artistic language, both refined and poetic, expresses all the tensions of the material she works with and reveals itself to our eyes thanks to two key elements of sculpture: weight and light.

Exhibition curated by Dalmazio Ambrosioni and Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini.

Caption: Petra Weiss, Meteora, 2019, image by Stefano Spinelli