ON VIEW
curaetd by Sara De Chiara
21.02.2026 > 09.05.2026
Opening hours | Thursady 2:00 > 7:00 pm, Friday and Saturday 10:30 am >12:30 pm – 2:00 > 7:00 pm Free admission.
The Sandra and Giancarlo Bonollo Foundation for Contemporary Art in Thiene marks the Italian debut of Swiss artist Annette Barcelo (1943) with the exhibition Melamptha, which retraces the last thirty years of her practice, curated by Sara De Chiara.
The exhibition project brings together a selection of works from her archive, created between the 1990s and 2024, some of which have never been shown before. Over the past thirty years, the artist’s practice has led her to experiment with a range of supports—paper, canvas, glass, and panel—shaping a feminine imagery suspended between reality and unreality, life and the afterlife. Her paintings unfold as liminal spaces in which the female body fades and merges with the surrounding landscape, its elements and creatures—flowers and animals—within atmospheres charged with symbolism and enigmatic meanings.
Explains Sara De Chiara, curator: «Barcelo’s art makes the viewer a witness to a world parallel to the real one, where the magical and the archaic, the legendary and the ritual, prevail. It encourages the observer to embrace visceral energies and to go beyond the rational logic that shapes our daily lives. Annette Barcelo’s creatures reveal a glimpse of a cosmology governed by other forces and dynamics».
Annette Barcelo / artist
Annette Barcelo was born in 1943 in Basel, where she currently resides and where she trained at the Schule für Gestaltung (School of Design). Her artistic practice, developed over more than fifty years, spans various techniques including painting, drawing, and printmaking often employed to create works organized in series. Her distinctive visual language explores connections between different existential dimensions, such as birth and death, as well as between flora and fauna, drawing on diverse mythologies. Barcelo’s work embodies an effort to transcend the dichotomy between the real and the unreal, affirming the existence of a third world a troubadour-like figure inhabiting all possible intersections between realms of reality, genres, and disciplines, between what is alive and what is not. In her practice, the artist proposes a dimension where worlds dance to the rhythm of mysterious forces, forming alliances with us humans weak and greedyand offering us strength and hope.
Among her most recent solo and group exhibitions are: Manifesta 15, Barcelona, ES (2024); see you next tuesday, Basel, CH (2024); Space 25, Basel, CH (2024); Madragoa, Lisbon, PT (2023); der TANK, Basel, CH (2023); Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, FR (2023); Kunsthaus Aarau, Aarau, CH (2023); Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, FR (2017); Galerie Mäder, Basel, CH (2016).