This first monograph devoted to the Italian designer Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi, structured along the lines of an auction catalogue, the volume, edited by Felix Burrichter (Pin-Up magazine), explores the inexhaustible ambiguity that defines the artist's creative universe.
Vases, chalices, coupes, carafes, and side tables unfold in a continuous stream of everyday yet enigmatic objects. In the artist's hands and through her gaze, familiar materials such as glass, ceramic, and marble become living, unsettling matter: the solid appears liquid, the familiar becomes uncanny, and even the most ordinary object can be transformed into an unknown organism, seemingly originating from another world.
The catalogue of works is interrupted and enriched by visual essays by Bela Borsodi, Camille Vivier, and Massimiliano Bomba, alongside four textual contributions: an introduction by Bruce Benderson, a story by Lucy McKenzie, a letter from Nicholas Korody to the artist, and a conversation between her and the editor of the publication. Together, these contributions form a collective narrative that plays with the catalogue's inventory-like structure, shaping a multifaceted work that is itself ambiguous, suspended between reality and artifice.
Born in Rome, Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi lives and works in Milan, where she is art director and set designer at Cameranesi Pompili Studio. Her practice is driven by an evolving, constructed idea of beauty, by the subjective ways reality is represented and remembered, and by the misconception of originality, often explored through collaboration. Her research explores aesthetic dissonances, fragility, tension and sensuality, friction, lists, and how pop and material culture shape collective visual memory. In her work the object and its representation have the same value.
Edited by Felix Burrichter.
Contributions by Bela Borsodi, Camille Vivier, Massimiliano Bomba, Bruce Benderson, Lucy McKenzie, Nicholas Korody, Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi, Felix Burrichter.
