Marie Denis: Spathes

Vino Vero, in collaboration with Lightbox, launches a new series of contemporary art events.

Every three months, international artists who celebrate nature through their work, will be invited to present site-specific works in the window of the wine club adjacent to the bar.

The first instalment (from September 25th – November 21st), presents the French artist Marie Denis, represented by Alberta Pane Gallery, Venice/Paris.

The work of Marie Denis (France, 1972) focuses mainly on the object and the ways it can be reinvented. Her installations and sculptures are inspired by botany, which the artist reinterprets through different media, creating pieces where elements of the universal and the everyday harmoniously converge. The nature Marie Denis presents is sensitive and ever-changing, susceptible to both interpretation and new meanings. Marie Denis’s works are manifested in her ability to study matter, which generates an alienating, taxidermic, transmuted, manipulated and changeable nature that leads to the distance between the real and the artificial. The artist focuses on processes of reinvention of the object, drawing inspiration from botany to blend everyday and universal elements, emulating a Wunderkammer (chamber of wonders). Her meticulous collection arouses attention and reflection around the plant world and a biological herbarium that highlights her scientific knowledge and collaborations. Perceptive delicacy and radicality of the forms in work. In her work “Spathes”, created in collaboration with the Giovanardi textile company and presented last December at the Alberta Pane Gallery, the artist states: “A meditation on forms and materials. Simplicity to the bone: in the darkroom of steel and aluminium. Coconut blades, engraved aluminium and matt black. The “Spathes” become Blades of Belfagor. The complex and the pure, the black and white of a two-tone nature: the obscure, explicit forms nourished by Eros and Thanatos”.