“Sleepwalking”, 2014 Oil on Canvas

Italian artist Anna Madia has certainly been influenced by Italian history. Her work is sensually composed with a strong Renaissance ambience. Dark backgrounds with subtle tones contrast against the lit portraits. Madia’s portraits have a contemporary and in some cases macabre twist, with hair or objects covering the face.

Madia was selected as a finalist in the Italian Factory Prize in 2004, in the Cairo Award in 2006 and in the British Portrait Award of the National Portrait Gallery of London in 2007. In 2008, she won the Renaissance Prize of the Italian Cultural Institute of London and La Fenice Prize of Venice.

In her own words:

Could you please introduce yourself and your background and explain what motivates you to create?
The need to be a painter was clear in my head since I was a child; this was my dream, a natural vocation. This is really my “vertebral column”.

“Sleepwalking”, 2014 Oil on Canvas

So all my choices were turned in this direction.  I graduated in Painting from the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts of Turin in Italy and started to work and move in Italy and abroad in order for my artwork to be discovered by galleries and professionals. I have tried to participate in some painting prizes like the Portrait Award of the National Portrait Gallery in London, where I was a finalist in 2007. This encouraged me a lot. In 2010, I moved to France, where I had won a residence of 3 years in an Art Centre.

Your paintings take a rather different approach compared to most ‘usual’ portraits. Why is this? What are you trying to convey?
The human figure is very important in my work. I started to draw people when I was a child. Portraits in literature and theatre have nourished my painting for years – Ophelia, Alice in Wonderland, ‘The girl without hands’ – these are some of the characters that I have chosen to pay homage to through my artistic work.

Circe

Currently, sleep and coma are the key elements of the new series titled “Sleepwalking”. Once a year, in my family, there was the ritual of washing the wool of the mattresses: every corner of the house was filled with a soft cream-colored substance and I spent hours and hours playing and imagining snow-capped peaks and bizarre appearances. Today this tradition is, for me, a rite of love and a liberation from the symbolic stigma of sleepless nights, nightmares and infirmity: the bed once again becomes the crib in which a new cycle starts. Wool, doilies and hair are the gateway to this world suspended between reality and dream. Researching on sleepwalking and other disorders (narcolepsy, hypnologic and hypnopompic hallucinations…), I started to investigate another kind of portrait: hidden faces, eyes cleared; enigmatic situations in which flashes and personal hallucinations appear.

In the introductory text of my last solo show, Sleepwalking, Beatrice Meunier-Dery uses the expression “woolgathering”, which represents the state of the consciousness that is experiencing a process of transformation from reality into a dream state. The human being is made to imagine and that’s how the intermediary’s plans of thought and imagination, of the psychic function of the real and of the unreal function, feed and intersect to produce psychological wonders of the human mind.

De Spherae 2013

Where do you hope to take your work in the next few years?
I hope to find more and more freedom! And to continue to grow my painting in an enigmatic direction.

If I must imagine my future artworks I see a mix of figurative and abstract painting, a lot of drawing and big sizes!!! We are going to see

Lastly, any words of advice for aspiring artists?
To believe!  The best advice I have received as an artist is to work hard and to have the capacity for self-examination and for examination of my work. Therefore, to renew and continue researching.

Born in 1976, Anna Madia graduated in Painting from the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts of Turin in 2002. In 2011, she was among the artists selected by Vittorio Sgarbi for the Italian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennial (Piedmont Region). 

In 2010 she won a triennial workshop at the Ginkgo Contemporary Art Centre in Troyes (France) and in 2009 she became a tutor in painting at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts of Turin. 

She currently lives and works in France.

All images courtesy of Anna Madia | http://s399243936.siteweb-initial.fr/

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Sonnambula 2014