Zoè Gruni

metato / metacorpo

Galleria Il Ponte opens the autumn season 2009 with an exhibition by a young artist - Zoè Gruni - whose work it has been following for more than two years. The exhibition is divided into two main parts. Presented in the top room are 13 large format photographs (100x150 cm) in which the artist herself or other personalities wear the head and body gear that she makes by sewing sacks together into the form of ‘costumes’. The bottom room hosts a projection of the digital video Metacorpo 2009, in which the artist’s flesh is incorporated into the image and lets it go into space. Its movements, as the artist states, show ‘how things and events participate in life’. She thus uses her body as a sort of pre-expression without linguistic mediation (duration 2.58 minutes. Filming and assembly technical aid: Cristiano Coppi).   

With the works on display, Zoè Gruni is trying to react to the spreading standardisation in the present-day world with an intimate reflection on man’s identity and memory. The variety of media used in her work comes about from the need to recount the body’s presence in it from various points of view: the hemp and jute in Metato become a container for a bodily mass which can turn into an actual personality. The works also are meant for sharing and participation. Her desire to communicate with others causes the artist to blend the subjective images of her memory with common forms of collective memory like the “metato” (the recipient used in Tuscany in the past for drying chestnuts). Hence, using her body, Zoè Gruni experiments various means of expression which are nevertheless part of a single process: drawing is the idea, sculpture the mould, performances action, and, as a result, video is the tool for documentation, and photography the finished image.

It is possible to visit the studio of Zoè Gruni at Pistoia in the context of the Open Studios (visits to the artist's studios), curated by the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina www.strozzina.org/open_studios