Margherita Manzelli interview – ‘I developed a way of denying being a complete painter’

As a major survey opens at Centro Pecci, the Italian artist discusses her lifelong struggle with the machismo of painting and why she has turned to robots

Margherita Manzelli and curator Stefano Collicelli Cagol. Photo: Chiara Riccio.

by AMIE CORRY

The solo exhibition of the work of Margherita Manzelli (b1968, Ravenna) at Centro Pecci in the Tuscan town of Prato spans nearly three decades of painting, sculpture and performance. It marks the return of an artist who, following major institutional recognition in the 90s and early 00s for her performances coupled with unnerving paintings of human subjects in abstract or set-like environments, has shown comparatively little over the past 19 years. This period aligned with Manzelli becoming a mother. She credits her gallery, Greengrassi in London, with enabling her to withstand the “drastic, mixed fracture” of navigating the art world’s lack of support for women and primary carers. “The [gallery] allowed me to persist in my struggle to resist as an artist and single mother in Italy, while the capricious art world was moving on to anything else,” she says. Many in this art world perceive motherhood as a “betrayal of the career path”. Her circumstances were compounded by the 2008 financial crash, as well as her decision to stay in Italy, “outside the art system centres”.

The survey, titled Le Signorine after Manzelli’s enigmatic subjects, demonstrates that she has always been something of an outlier. When we meet in the cafe at Centro Pecci, the first purpose-built Italian institution devoted to contemporary art, Manzelli says of her experiences as a young female artist in Italy: “In a way, I was such a weird artist, that it helped. But there was not much interest in women artists then. I had no models of women painters. There were only the men, whom I rejected.” Manzelli describes that rejection as a response not just to a lack of role models but to the fractured and shame-laden practice of painting in Italy in the 90s, following the exuberant figuration favoured by artists such as Francesco Clemente in the 80s. It is why, she explains, she developed “such a personal research”.

Margherita Manzelli: Le signorine, installation view, Centro Pecci, Prato, 14 December 2024 – 2 February 2025. Photo: Alessandro Saletta, Agnese Bedini - DSL Studio.

The “signorine” that inhabit her large-scale paintings are haunting creatures. Their bodies are sometimes near-emaciated. They are usually inert – reclining languidly, while their eyes remain trained on the viewer. Their principal energy arguably derives from this tension – between the action of the gaze and physical passivity, between agency and vulnerability.

In Pecci’s expansive galleries, figurative paintings and watercolours of eerie, semi-masked faces, are shown alongside a group of new works. The latter includes a robotic sculpture in traditional Catalan dress who moves haltingly around the gallery spouting Manzelli’s poetry when it homes in on the face of a viewer or, in a twist unexpected by the artist, the faces in the paintings. The robot, Mercedes (part of the performance Belief Systems,2024), has a Janus face, one of which is inspired by a Renaissance sphinx carved for the pulpit of Prato’s magnificent cathedral. It is a funny and sharp work; a melancholic alter ego, masquerading in black lace, forcing poetry on those who will listen, so her creator remains undisturbed. It makes sense on meeting Manzelli, who is witty and playful, cautious, yet excited about the exhibition’s moment.

She dislikes the theatre of exhibition openings, and her performances have often been developed to avoid social interaction at previews. These have included La Vita Felice (1996), in which Manzelli was suspended just above the ground, supported by a metal corset magnetically attached to the wall. Almost 30 years later, the corset and straps are arranged on Pecci’s gallery floor between canvases – another stand-in for the artist.

Alongside Manzelli and an excellent permanent collection, Pecci is showing exhibitions of Peter Hujar’s photographs and Louis Fratino’s paintings, figurative and landscape. Fratino’s current success was picked out by Dean Kissick in his polemic against today’s “painters of contemporary identities” (The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art, Harper’s Magazine, December 2024). I ask Manzelli, who has maintained a remarkably consistent painting practice for three decades, how she feels about the discourse surrounding the fashionability of contemporary figurative painting, but she won’t be drawn. “These things go up and down and come and go,” she shrugs, singular to the end.

Margherita Manzelli: Le signorine, installation view, Centro Pecci, Prato, 14 December 2024 – 2 February 2025. Photo: Alessandro Saletta, Agnese Bedini - DSL Studio.

Manzelli moved to Milan in the early 90s, after studying architecture and fine art, then sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna. She spent time in New York at the end of the 90s, where she discovered a dramatically different attitude to painting than in Italy. Her solo exhibitions include: MAXXI, the national museum of 21st-century arts, Rome, in 2003; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004; and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia in 2010. She has participated in group exhibitions at: the ICA, London; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Venice Biennale; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the XXV São Paulo Biennial among others.

Manzelli talked to Studio International in Centro Pecci’s cafe the morning after the exhibition opening.

Amie Corry: I revisited the exhibition this morning and the robot sculpture was standing alone, staring silently out of the window in a very melancholic way.

Margherita Manzelli: It’s her favourite spot! I insisted to Federico, the engineer, who is the son of my best friend, that she stays there in front of the window – she’s very Victorian, staring out of the window, waiting.

AC: You conceptualised her for this exhibition to pair with the paintings?

MM: I usually do performances, which I prefer to term “actions”, during my exhibition openings. But this time I wanted a filter between me and what was being presented and I thought a robot would do a good job. They’re such strange beings. They are, in a way, very melancholic. I’m influenced by science fiction, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun, in which he writes about robots developing feelings and thoughts and ways of dealing with human beings. I had the idea for a robot that was a kind of avatar for myself, searching for people, trying to make them listen to poems. We developed a real character – the way she reads the poetry and then runs away, sometimes she just stares at you and moves without speaking. She has a very distinct character.

AC: Can we go back to those “actions”? In the 90s, these included La Vita Felice (1996), but also a 1994 performance that involved you suspending 103 drawings from fishing lines held between your teeth (at Studio Guenzani in Milan). Do you see the actions as intrinsic companions to the paintings? What’s the relationship?

MM: Performance was really my way of dealing with painting in Italy in the 90s, because Italy had, and still has, a really bad relationship with painting. After the Transavanguardia movement in the 80s, things were very fractured. Developing interesting painting was really difficult. So, I found a way of denying being a complete painter. That’s why I developed a conceptual idea of art connected to painting. It really came into focus for me when I went to New York and met painters – John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and others – who were so into painting. They didn’t understand why I was “wasting time” on performances. One of them, particularly playful, would make jokes, calling me Marina Abramović! They couldn’t understand it. It was ridiculous to them at that time.

There was a kind of machismo with painting, which I detest. I couldn’t stand it. I was a painter, but I didn’t want to be in the position of defending painting. I just wanted to paint, and that’s how I feel now. From the beginning, I developed a contorted route. The route was denial, but it often happens with a contorted path that you can develop interesting things. You can develop a multivision attitude. In a way, I felt that painting wasn’t enough, because I grew up with that idea in Italy and you can never shift that. But it’s a matter of vision. Mercedes, the robot, has a very strong visual impact. I really see her inside the space. I thought she was a kind of landlady in the gallery. It is a “room of her own”. She is named after the character in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Mercedes in that novel has a double face: she is waiting for Edmond Dantès and even though she marries another man, she is always waiting, loving Dantès for ever. There’s a doubling. The novel is based on hope and destruction: everybody in it is hoping for something to happen, developing a savage kind of resistance.

Margherita Manzelli: Le signorine, installation view, Centro Pecci, Prato, 14 December 2024 – 2 February 2025. Photo: Alessandro Saletta, Agnese Bedini - DSL Studio.

AC: Those struggles with painting in the 90s were presumably compounded by being a woman?

MM: Of course. There was not much interest in women painters at that time, especially in Italy. There were no role models – only men and I rejected them. I think that’s why I developed this very personal research. I could see only myself.

AC: That’s interesting – that almost isolated mode – because you can’t date the paintings in the exhibition by looking at them. There are variations, of course – in the backgrounds and characteristics of the individuals – but you can’t really pick out distinct phases.

MM: The only thing I always wanted to avoid was connecting the paintings to the past, so it came very naturally to me to put my characters in contemporary contexts, especially at the beginning. In Stilnox (1998)[it is named after a sleep-aid tablet], a very light painting, you find strange patterning in the background, almost a spider web pattern. I wanted kind of futuristic/primitive symbols. I wanted to put her, the subject, in an out-of-time environment. I didn’t want to make paintings about a specific time.

AC: How do you describe your subjects, these people?

MM: As really fragile yet strong human beings. Really overexposed and very conscious of their overexposure, but they don’t care. They just stay there and resist. Watching you. That’s it. They occupy their bodies, and their bodies occupy the space. The only thing they can do is watch you and so they do it for ever.

AC: It feels as if one of the tensions they exhibit is between action and perhaps, inertia. There is the passivity of the body, but the gaze is extremely forceful.

MM: There was a time when I really enjoyed the friction between stillness and gaze. And it is still like that. Concentrating on the gaze is interesting to me. The more I concentrate on the gaze, the stronger it gets. It’s fantastic. I don’t force anything. The gaze comes out like this – so strong. Sometimes when I paint them, they have a kind of pathetic gaze. They are on the verge of crying. I like this moment when you don’t know if they are going to laugh or cry.

Margherita Manzelli: Le signorine, installation view, Centro Pecci, Prato, 14 December 2024 – 2 February 2025. Photo: Alessandro Saletta, Agnese Bedini - DSL Studio.

AC: And they come entirely from your imagination?

MM: Yes, it’s always been that way. Partly for practical reasons. The idea of someone coming every day to the studio to sit for me – I can’t deal with that. I don’t have any assistants. I do everything on my own. I always think of Stanley Kubrick, who wanted to do everything by himself [laughs]. I can understand it: as far as I can, I do everything, lights, camera, cutting. I don’t want to have models or paint from images. When you use images, the paintings develop a standard, which I don’t like. I don’t want to make portraits. I’ve developed a strange way of making portraits of non-existent people. I invent a person. I think that’s why the faces come out as they do. I really have no idea who they are or where they come from, which is the question people always ask me. And I’m sorry, but I really have no idea! But it’s interesting, you know the iPhone collects photographs of people in your camera roll and in the last few years, my phone began making connections between my painted subjects and photos of my son. So, maybe there are some features that are inside my brain that come out, but I really have no intention of painting my son. The other thing is that people kind of recognise themselves in the paintings often, maybe because they’re nobody … and everybody.

Margherita Manzelli. Definitivamente entrata - corpo celeste, 1998. Oil on linen, 200 x 250 cm. Private collection, London. Courtesy of the artist.

AC: Presumably you think about their age and gender?

MM: I’ve asked myself this many times. There’s one painting in particular that I remember I really didn’t decide the gender of when I painted it. It’s of a woman on the sofa, Definitivamente Entrata – Corpo Celeste (1998), which translates as something like “definitely entered – heavenly body”. Eventually, I realised I could leave it ambiguous. I don’t know. The title is female, but I’m not sure. I don’t decide. With their ages – with the earlier paintings, I suppose they linked to what I was seeing in the mirror, so they’re younger. As I aged, I decided to age them as well. I didn’t want to make portraits of young women. But sometimes I have to force myself not to. The temptation to make them younger is still very strong.

AC: Well, it’s very socialised! They’re often naked or semi-naked. Do you think about their position within the traditions of the nude and the gaze?
 
MM: I want to paint the body, but I don’t want them to be erotic subjects. When I first exhibited my work, critics described what they perceived as a “hidden erotic mood” in the paintings and I really didn’t like it. That’s why I started to contort the bodies. I didn’t want people to have this attitude of desire. What I really wanted was not an erotic gaze, but a different kind of gaze. It’s so easy to make [an image of] a beautiful woman. If I find I’ve made one of them too beautiful, I do something about it. And the way they are sometimes so skinny – a lot of flesh just seems to make them sexy, and I don’t want that. I try to find a non-erotic way to present them even if they have flesh on display. It’s very difficult though.

Margherita Manzelli. Senza fine, 2023. Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm. Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy of the artist and greengrassi, London.

AC: You are required to integrate the viewer’s perception into your own interpretation.

MM: Yes. I am very conscious that people do see my work, so I integrate that, like a third eye. It’s me and my paintings, but I know they are viewed.

AC: One of the aspects that does shift is the environment the figures reside in. Sometimes the background is uniformly patterned or made up of blocks of colour and shadow. Elsewhere, there are strange, quite theatrical set pieces or props built out around a central figure.
 
MM: In the beginning, they were realistic environments, like sets and then I tried to make them more and more abstract and unreal. I didn’t want them to be repetitive. And I didn’t want to be a painter of women within interiors, even if they’re very abstract. At a certain period, in the 00s, they became just colours and lights – sets. Now I’ve integrated the interior or domestic and the abstract because I need them to be in a place. I’m very dependent on formal systems for building these creatures – lights, shadows, projections – I need a plane, a background, and I cannot do anything about that. I need a set, a kind of theatre or cinematic thing. Sometimes, I like to play with the fact that the background becomes more important than the figure in the foreground, or it influences it much more. So sometimes I perceive the background as if it’s coming from inside the figure or the background is overwhelming the figure, like an interior infection.

Margherita Manzelli: Le signorine, installation view, Centro Pecci, Prato, 14 December 2024 – 2 February 2025. Photo: Alessandro Saletta, Agnese Bedini - DSL Studio.

AC: And that’s when you see the patterning mirrored in the skin of the figure?

MM: Yes, and you don’t know where these decorations start – from inside or outside.

AC: From inside their minds?

MM: Yes, one thing I really like is when you perceive that the background comes from the head of the character – a nightmare or imagination or obsession.

AC: Tell me more about the process of building the figures and their worlds?
 
MM: I see them in my mind quite precisely before depicting them, and then I draw. I’ve tried to make preliminary sketches on an iPad, but they created their own reality and became something else. Like painting a mural, where a small image is projected to make something huge and it becomes kind of mechanical. I didn’t want that. So, I put the iPad away and I just keep the image in my mind and try to project them on to the paintings. It’s exhausting but the results are better. It takes a long time to make a drawing. The image is very instinctual and kind of irrational, but the process is very like a project. It’s like an architectural project, maybe because I studied architecture for five years at high school. In Italy, there was an art and architecture double pathway but in my hometown, Ravenna, there was only the architectural pathway. I had to work on building projects – schools, hospitals – and I really suffered! It was the opposite of art-making to me, but it gave me a structure. My paintings are really organised like projects. We have this volume, the light comes here, we have these materials – the wooden floor ... It takes a long time to project everything. So, when I start painting, it’s quite easy. It comes very fast. I can paint very fast – I lost the large triptych [L’Infinito della Mia Distrazione, 2024] through flooding and I had to redo it really fast.
 
AC: Oh, wow – the triptych that’s inspired by the Lippi frescoes in Prato Cathedral?

MM: Somehow, yes, by the geometries of the floors and the dancing Salome.

AC: Tell me about the watercolours. When I first saw them, I thought of Marlene Dumas.

MM: To me, they were the easiest way to concentrate on faces in the most direct way. I’ve always thought I can’t paint and draw at the same time. If I’m painting, I’m painting. The watercolours in the show are just a few of a really big series that I made at the same time almost 30 years ago. I have hundreds of them. When I make the watercolours, I can be very direct. I can get to the focus of my work, which is the head, the face. Sometimes I think the paintings are just one face and maybe I can avoid painting the environment. Sometimes I try to paint one face, but I can’t resist the energy and colours of the backgrounds. My paintings are structured as targets. There is a target – the face. And the watercolours remind you of that. They remind you, or maybe me, that there’s a target, a focus.

AC: They bring a different texture to the show as well.

MM: Yes, it’s a different way of painting. It’s difficult to paint expressionistically. Even if I try sometimes, the result is horrible. So, the watercolours are freeing. There is a kind of freedom to those paintings that I really enjoy. Because my other drawings, which aren’t in this show, are very controlled.

AC: I see that. So Le signorine spans 30 years. Do you feel this painting practice – this methodical way of working, the fixation on individual female subjects, the sets and structure of the composition – will always stay with you?
 
MM: I guess I cannot escape or avoid it. Le signorine and painting are one thing to me, they don’t exist without each other. All the time, I say I’ll stop when I want, but painting always comes to catch me when I’m on the verge of losing her. The word paintingin Italian is a feminine word – funny isn’t it!

• Margherita Manzelli: Le Signorine is at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy, until 11 May 2025.