MARIATERESA SARTORI

Venice, 1961



 

 

Opening 15 November 2025 at 12:00 noon
15 November 2025 - 15 January 2026
Tuesday - Saturday 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm
GMR, Giudecca 800 Q, Venice

The Michela Rizzo Gallery is pleased to present Boulder, the group exhibition that will conclude the exhibition series at the former brewery site. The exhibition, which will open on Saturday 15 November 2025 at 12:00, will feature a dialogue between the work of Hamish Fulton and that of Matthew Attard, Ivan Barlafante, Michael Höpfner, Francesco Jodice, Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti, David Rickard, Antonio Rovaldi, Mariateresa Sartori, Claudio Tesser and Silvano Tessarollo.

Boulders is inspired by the work Boulder by Hamish Fulton, a British artist who has made walking an artistic language and an act of awareness. Based on direct experience of the landscape and a radical conception of the relationship between art and nature, Fulton's work becomes the starting point for a choral and intergenerational dialogue around the symbol of the boulder, an emblem of strength, permanence and memory of the landscape.

Within this horizon, the artists in the exhibition are arranged according to their varying degrees of proximity to Fulton's thinking. Michael Höpfner and Antonio Rovaldi share his experiential and meditative approach more directly: both investigate walking as a means of knowledge and immersion in the landscape, restoring its physical and inner dimensions through drawings, photographs and installations.

More lateral but deeply akin in poetic tension are Mariateresa Sartori, Matthew Attard and Ivan Barlafante, who translate their relationship with nature into languages of perception and thought. Sartori presents a large installation created using the frottage technique, dedicated to the materials of stones and sand, accompanied by a book that intertwines artistic vision and scientific observation. Attard, through drawing and the use of a pen plotter, transforms three-dimensional scans of boulders into graphic tracings that blend digital precision and manual intervention, exploring the limits of perception and image.

Around these nuclei are gathered artists who, while starting from different languages and perspectives, broaden the reflection on the link between man, nature and space. David Rickard explores the material and perceptual relationships between architecture and the environment; Ryts Monet, Maurizio Pellegrin, Cesare Pietroiusti and Francesco Jodice offer conceptual and narrative visions that open up the theme of landscape to new cultural and social geographies. In particular, Jodice presents a large-scale work from the WEST project, a journey through cities born during the gold rush and now abandoned, in which the landscape becomes an archive of utopias and failures.

Silvano Tessarollo and Claudio Tesser present works in which nature reveals itself in its fragile concreteness, between memory, time and transformation. The exhibition will centre on two wall paintings by Hamish Fulton, Glacial Boulder and Revisiting The Boulders, which will occupy a significant part of the space, giving shape and breath to the entire project.

With Boulder, the Michela Rizzo Gallery concludes an important season of its journey on the Giudecca, entrusting the image of the boulder – solid and immobile but at the same time shaped by time – with the task of preserving the memory of a shared place and time. A landing place that is also a threshold: the last step before a new direction.

Mariateresa Sartori was born in Venice in 1961, where she lives and works. She graduated in German studies with a thesis on Freud and the psychology of art. Her research revolves around three thematic pillars: the empirical scientific method, behavioral dynamics often in relation to neuroscience, and music and sound in relation to language. The tension between the objective and the subjective, between the uniqueness of events and general theory, nourishes all of her research, which often involves collaboration with experts in the disciplines she explores: geologists, theoretical physicists, linguists, musicologists, musicians, singers, actors, botanists, ornithologists... Real data is empirically collected and then analyzed from angles that vary from work to work and lead to different outcomes, from video to drawing, from pinhole photography to sound works. The artist is driven not by the achievement—if ever possible—of objectivity, but by the tension “towards” it. In 2024, she exhibited in a group show with David Rikard, titled “Aether/Etere. La presenza dell’assente,” curated by Riccardo Greco, at Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice. In 2023, she presented a solo exhibition titled “Vento: SW 2km/h, debole, Lodi 28 ottobre 2023,” curated by Carlo Orsini, at Platea Palazzo Galeano, Lodi. In the same year, Sartori participated in the Ravenna Mosaic Biennale with the work “L’aria ha un peso,” curated by Luca Donelli. In Munich, she created the performance “Der Klang der Sprache/The Sound of Language,” first presented as a live performance at the Münchener Kammerspiele and later as a sound installation at the Habibi Kiosk, in 2023; both works were curated by Gina Penzkofer. In 2021, Sartori collaborated with composer Paolo Marzocchi on the performance “The Sound of Dante,” held in various international venues including Berlin, Moscow, and Venice. In 2019, she exhibited “Telling Time,” a project in dialogue with Roman Opalka at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, curated by Chiara Bertola. In previous years, she presented exhibitions such as “You are the music while the music lasts” at Galleria Michela Rizzo in 2013 and “Homage to Chopin” at the Greenhouse at the Giardini Venice Biennale in 2011, which demonstrate Sartori’s long-standing engagement with music and language, two central themes of her work.

 

Curriculum Vitae

 

mariasartori.net