A tribute to artist Marinella Pirelli on the centenary of her birth with the event Il mio possibile vero, a performance featuring Marinella Pirelli’s films and texts accompanied by a reading by Isabella Ragonese and live music by Laura Agnusdei, and the project room Marinella Pirelli. Fino al margine del bosco: Disegni, fotografie, film.
Curated by Giulia Simi
Il mio possibile vero
Live performance
Marinella Marinelli – her surname before marrying Giovanni Pirelli – was born in Verona exactly one hundred years ago, in 1925. She began painting at a very young age, during her high school years, when she was living in Belluno due to her father’s work. She soon began attending the studio of Istrian painter and illegal refugee Romano Conversano. She owed this freedom to pursue her passions and talents to both her mother, the daughter of landowners from Cadore, and her father, a soldier who was intolerant of fascist customs and died of a heart attack in 1941 “while agonizing over the lists of soldiers to be sent to Albania to replace those who had fallen,” according to her biographical notes. On the night of the wake, the artist recounts, one of the officers keeping the family company spoke to her about cubism and futurism. Conversano’s studio in Belluno was, in those years, less peripheral than we might think. It was there, in fact, that Marinella Marinelli met Rodolfo Sonego, a painter who would later become one of the most important screenwriters of Italian comedy, as well as the Venetian Emilio Vedova, who, like Romano, was also an illegal refugee. It was thanks to him that she immersed herself in the tenacious intertwining of avant-garde and militancy.
As is often the case for women of her generation, Marinella is almost the only female artist among artists. And yet, perhaps thanks to the unconventional upbringing her family gave her, she immediately understands the possibilities that bodies can explore. The years of second-wave feminism are still far off, and acts of rebellion are dictated above all by impulses of emancipation and the aspiration for equality. Thus, in 1947, at a group exhibition at Palazzo Davanzati in Florence on the occasion of the first meeting of the Youth Front coordinated by a young Enrico Berlinguer, she and her few fellow female artists refused to sleep in a convent, while their male colleagues were housed in the former Casa del Fascio: “[…] even then, it seemed normal to me that living the same life as men was a matter of moral rigor, and prudery a matter of moralism. For many years afterward, moralism and morality continued to be confused: it would be one of the worst complications of the PCI.” In the same year, Marinella arrived in Milan for the first time. She stayed in the Lombard city for four years, supporting herself for a few years first as a fashion designer, then as a set designer and actress for the newly formed theater company Il Carrozzone. She had no money, and painting from life was still the horizon against which she measured herself, refining her practice of long-term observation and observation.
In 1951, she decided to move to Rome, which she perceived as the most active laboratory for pictorial experimentation. However, in those years, the Italian capital was also and above all the city of cinema, an environment in which the young painter immediately found her place. Cinema was not only a place of visual fascination, in years of effervescence, including technological advances – from Technicolor to Cinerama – but also an area where it was easy to earn money. After her first experience as an extra in Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51, Marinella Marinelli began working at Filmeco, a production company specializing in documentaries and animated films. She recounts: “I learn to film step by step, frame by frame, 24 frames per second: that’s thousands of drawings. But it’s like the passing of time in music. On this meter and on this basis are the tempos of movement, the rhythm unfolds. Not only is the eye involved in the shooting, but also the breath, the heartbeat. It is a complete physical relationship of perception.”
Her reflections on cinema echo French theories of the 1920s, particularly Germaine Dulac’s reflections on cinéma pur. During the same period, she continued to paint and still chose a figurative dimension: “It must be borne in mind that at that time it was difficult for a young person, and even more so for a young woman, to move freely and have the right contacts in the world of culture and, through interaction with others, discover their own identity. In the middle of the last century, young people who attempted to pursue art, in addition to having grown up isolated due to fascism and war, found themselves bewildered between neorealism and abstractionism. It was easy and tempting to pick up one style or the other. I was a figurative painter, but being figurative as a young person mainly means looking at the world to try to understand it. Looking at the world. Trying to understand. In this active observation, Marinella Pirelli—who chose to keep Giovanni Pirelli’s surname after her marriage in 1953—rigorously practiced paying attention to living things. Her gaze turned to the plant world from a young age, when she collaborated with botanist Francesco Caldart, creating illustrations of plant specimens in a guide designed for teachers as an “introduction to nature for children.”
To love nature, first of all you need to know it. You also need to give names to the living creatures that surround us. And so Marinella looks, observes, draws. And then looks, observes, draws again. She captures the light that shines on plants and animals. On pollinators feeding among the corollas of flowers. “I remember the amazement I felt at the sparkle of a bee’s wing illuminated by the sun,” she writes in her notes. Later, all her works—cinematic, environmental, graphic, pictorial, cine-sculptural—would maintain a close relationship with living beings, recognizing in light and movement, respectively, the source and trace of the existence of bodies on earth. Hers was a quest that never stopped. Even when, after the death of Giovanni Pirelli, she retired from the art world, which she no longer found sustainable, her adventure in artistic practice continued unabated. It consisted of observations, writings, drawings, paintings, photographs, re-editions of her films, and reenactments of her environmental installations. It also consisted of planting plants, watering them, and pruning them.
Marinella Pirelli. Fino al margine del bosco: Disegni, fotografie, film.
Project room
Marinella Pirelli paid attention to the plant world throughout her entire life. She sought, in those bodies nourished by light and water, the truth of painting and, even more so, the truth of existence. From botanical illustrations made in ink on recycled paper in the early postwar years, to flowers observed and captured—perhaps with a Rolleiflex—in slides that become studies for future works, and finally to films, where the plant element constantly emerges as a trace of life, of a past that becomes a moment in the present, of seasons that pass and transform bodies.
It is by observing trembling leaves pierced by rays of light, the often circular shape of flowers, and the drops of water resting on blades of grass that Marinella Pirelli grasps the moment of being. Ourselves and the world, together. It is a gaze of long duration slow, patient, rooted in waiting and in openness toward the other. It is the kind of attention that Simone Weil described, in which “the soul empties itself of all its own content in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as it is, in all its truth.”
This gaze is also one of proximity: extreme close-ups, or even single details, are often the chosen framing in her macro photography, based on the idea that devices for recording reality can reveal what is invisible to the human eye. The veins of petals and leaves, the refraction of light. And the primary forms that are revealed, above all, the circle.
In this small room of vegetal epiphanies, the light of analog projectors, photographic and filmic, immerses us in the journey through plants that Marinella Pirelli undertook throughout her life.
Here, it focuses on the time span stretching from the early postwar period, the botanical illustrations for the herbariums date from 1948–1949 to the transition between the 1960s and 1970s.
To immerse oneself in her gaze means to enter into a close, participatory relationship with the plant world, one that the artist and filmmaker was able to weave long before ecological thinking began to permeate artistic practices.
And she did so through a perspective of “media ecology,” where drawing and media devices coexist.
Through drawings, photographs, and films, Marinella Pirelli helps us see what normally goes unnoticed by our eyes or, at best, appears only as a backdrop, a fragment of landscape always secondary to human existence.
And yet, in country fields, in city gardens, in the public parks of our neighborhoods, there exists a community of living beings.
It is our community. To the edge of the woods. And beyond.
Sala Berti – Refettorio delle Monache dell’ex Convento di San Mattia – Via Sant’Isaia 20
26.09–05.10.2025
opening hours
27–30.09 > 9.30 – 19.30
01-05.10 > 14.00 – 18.00 or by appointment
