Martina Simeti

From 20 September to 11 November 2020, Martina Simeti presents Un bout de toi, Salomon, the first solo show to be held in Italy by the French artist Mimosa Echard (France, 1986).

In this exhibition project designed especially for the gallery, the artist presents a new series of human-sized sculpture-containers which, given their transparency, display tubular shapes within them, intertwined to form large spirals. They stand majestically, as if they were “gateways evoking a sense of transcendence, in a very physical scale, being that of the human body.” This is how they are described by Mimosa Echard herself in a conversation with the artist Gaia Vincensini as part of the dialogues featured in the project The Form of a Conversation* promoted by Martina Simeti.

As always in Mimosa Echard’s work, the body plays a key role. There’s an inside and an outside and a limit to be crossed, unfolding amid membranes wrapped around themselves like intestines, filled with a variety of solids and liquids: medicinal plants, small objects both precious and common, in osmosis between one another, “forced to cohabitate,” trapped in a visceral and dizzying composition.

In Echard’s work, there is an “aesthetic, emotional or amorous excitement” which the artist refers to the ’70s psychedelic climate of the village in the Cévennes where she grew up in a small self-run community which still serves as the key source of inspiration and materials for her research.