Greta Pasquini
About trees and histories

At the beginning there is the desire to work on the ordinary, to try to find resonance through common personal experiences. Childhood, death, loss, discovery, imponderability, transformation, transmission … Greta Pasquini’s artistic material is memory and time: remembrance. She expresses herself through drawings and the transformation of ordinary objects, accumulated by a kind of fetishistic reflex, attracted by waste that is worthless yet beautiful: receipts, cardboard tubes, wrappings… Her work takes shape in the fertile soil of her memories and draws its strength from the tension between its physical presence, the echo of the memories that inspired it, and the experience of the viewer.

This exhibition features the trees of a childhood garden in the form of portraits, each with their own peculiarity. Implicitly, the history of this garden serves as a stage for the three generations who experienced it. Five characters inhabit the gallery space for the duration of the exhibition. We see them in the drawings. We hear fragments of their thoughts. We find the objects of their daily lives abandoned or left behind.

Greta Pasquini was born in Florence in 1970. Her father designed and created prototypes for electric cars and her grandfather studied acoustics and produced high resolution speakers. This atmosphere of technical creativity influenced Greta throughout her childhood and beyond, and led her to enter the Bologna School of Engineering. After graduation, she worked with the architect and intellectual Giancarlo De Carlo in Milan. In 2000 she moved to Paris, where she graduated from the Paris La Villette school of architecture. She worked with Renzo Piano and gained access to the artistic world of Paris. In 2009, she completed her first personal architectural achievement: a group of residences on the hills of Bologna, built to replace her grandparents’ house and garden. Following that experience, she shifted her focus from architecture to the visual arts. She began to develop an oeuvre inspired by the history of this lost garden.