At Castle Gamba, Sarah Ledda's recent production draws from classic Hollywood cinema

The Gamba Castle-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Aosta Valley, in Châtillon, welcomes from July 14 to October 1, 2023 the exhibition Almost True by Sarah Ledda (Aosta, 1970), which aims to retrace the poetics of the artist from Valle d’Aosta through about thirty paintings from her recent production.

Curated by Ivan Quaroni, the exhibition recounts by drawing onfilm and television imagery, and in particular the repertoire of classic Hollywood cinema, the formation of female identity through characters that become symbols, lemmas of a common lexicon capable of translating a “bildung,” a collective formation, into universal images. Scrolling through images of classic films and old television series, the artist selects and isolates individual frames to transfigure them through painting. The frame, sublimated into pictorial grammar, thus becomes an expression of a new kind of realistic representation that uses the filter of mass culture media productions to investigate the themes of memory and emotions in the dialectical relationship between fiction and reality.

The image taken from the old film, whether it is that of the face of a Hollywood diva such as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor or Judy Garland, or that of the young Inger Nilsson as Pippi Longstocking, no longer belongs only to the artist who interprets it, but becomes a universal code, capable of stimulating a reaction in anyone who recognizes it.

“Sarah Ledda’s research is configured as a practice of recoding the filmic image capable of transforming the traumatic essence of reality into an alphabet of recognizable figures,” explained curator Ivan Quaroni.

Along with a body of works on canvas, a project created by the artist over ten years of train travel along the Aosta - Turin route, round trip, is being exhibited for the first time in the rooms of Castello Gamba. It is A/R, the title of a series of photographic shots mounted in a long video sequence depicting glimpses of landscapes that, despite the changes they have undergone over time, seem to have remained unchanged.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Vanillaedizioni with critical text by Ivan Quaroni.

For info: www.castellogamba.vda.it

Admission included in the museum entrance fee (6 euros full, 4 euros reduced).

Hours: daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. in July and August, closed Mondays from September.

Image: Sarah Ledda, Ophelia (2020; oil on canvas, 68 x 80 cm).

At Castle Gamba, Sarah Ledda's recent production draws from classic Hollywood cinema

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