Margherita Manzelli. The Young Ladies, Exhibition Pecci Centre, Prato

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Margherita Manzelli. The Young Ladies

From 14 December to 11 May 2025

Pecci Centre

Viale della Repubblica, 277, Prato

Closed today: open Wednesday at 10:00

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The Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci in Prato presents, from Saturday, December 14, 2024 to Sunday, May 11, 2025, the exhibition Margherita Manzelli. The young ladies.The exhibition project, in partnership with Intesa Sanpaolo, brings together a selection of paintings created by Margherita Manzelli from the nineties to the present day, along with a series of drawings and a core of works created specifically for this exhibition, one of which is inspired by the Cathedral of Santo Stefano, the cathedral of the city of Prato.The title is inspired by the artist's way of referring to the female characters that have always populated her works. Independent, proud, timeless, androgynous, Manzelli's young ladies take the stage and decide their own modes and forms of representation, challenging ancient conventions and asserting their independence from family ties.In her subjects, the female body – along with the exploration of her own visionary obsessions – becomes the pretext to dive headfirst into pictorial experimentation, and to indiscriminately blur the boundaries between the genres typical of the medium's tradition; ultimately, to play with the ambiguity of the artist's condition, suspended between the need to expose oneself by circulating one's work and the need to withdraw, to protect one's human dimension.The young ladies are individuals who, from the beginning of her work, have populated the artist's fantasies. With determination, Manzelli has probed their psychological tensions, showing their fragility and resistance. Hyper-vigilant and bloodless, naked or semi-naked, they seem ready for dissection or the challenge of conventions; held back by the subtle barrier of their own skin and with a gaze that overflows and pierces the viewer, these women overturn the axioms of the representation of the female body in art history, conceived for the male gaze. In the paintings, the young ladies are placed within an abstract spatiality, consisting of large fields with geometric patterns, floral subjects, reminiscent of fantasies of imaginary or real fabrics – even of the artist's own garments – or spaces regulated by colored vertical bands. Central to Manzelli's works is the relationship between subject and background, maintained in a continuous tension where the main subject seems to emerge, and at the same time merge, with the context in which it is placed. In this exercise of perception, with the background colors composing the somatic features of the painted young ladies, Manzelli captivates the viewer.

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	opens - closes	last entry
monday	Closed now
tuesday	Closed now
wednesday	10:00 - 19:00
thursday	10:00 - 19:00
friday	10:00 - 19:00
saturday	10:00 - 19:00
sunday	10:00 - 19:00

Margherita Manzelli. The Young Ladies

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