Letting herself be freely inspired by The Map of Hell, the key to the one hundred Drawings for the Divine Comedy commissioned from Sandro Botticelli between 1480 and 1495 by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Luisa Rabbia tackles the ancestral theme of ‘evil’, transforming Dante’s circles into ribcages within which the most critical topics of our contingent history resonate, such associal injustice, war, abortion, anxiety or the impossibility to intervene. The distance from a pyramidal and religious vision of the world already emerges in the abstract approach of Luisa Rabbia’s hand, where the pure color of the wax crayon, be it spread out or scraped, speaks to us with an empathic-emotional rather than a mental-descriptive lexicon. (Excerpt from a documentary directed by Marco Marcassoli, produced by Yanzi SRL in occasion of Luisa Rabbia’s solo show at The Drawing Hall, Bergamo, Italy, October 2022)
“During her residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2007, artist Luisa Rabbia was inspired by photographs Isabella Gardner collected and pasted into elaborate travel scrapbooks while traveling in China in 1883. . . . In Travels with Isabella (2008), Rabbia takes and rearranges these archival photographs to create a video of an imaginary landscape, and a running panoramic view of her own journey through these photographs, and through space and time. The artist animates these archival photographs with her own drawings, along with music and other images inspired by her residency. The result is a fantastical narrative that is both contemporary and historical”. (Pieranna Cavalchini, Isabella Stewart Garner Museum, curator)
