Grazia Danti's exhibition at Palazzo Portinari Salviati

From 28 November 2022 to 6 January 2023 in the Sala Beatrice and the Corte di Cosimo I the works of the well-known Florentine artist

From 28 November 2022 to 6 January 2023, in the Sala Beatrice and the Corte di Cosimo I of Palazzo Portinari Salviati in Florence, the Florentine artist Grazia Danti is exhibiting 10 works focusing on woman, on the essence and universe of women. The origins of Palazzo Portinari Salviati go back to Folco Portinari, the father of Beatrice, Dante Alighieri's muse, and in these monumental spaces the memory of Dante and Beatrice is intertwined with the power of the great Florentine families. Today, Chic Nonna Dubai, Vito Mollica's new restaurant, is also located here.

The exhibition, entitled Femminile plurale (Feminine Plural), which can be visited with free admission, is set in a treasure chest of art and architecture that is at the same time a symbolic place of the great history of Florence, in its ancient heart, a stone's throw from the Duomo.

addio a pearl harbour 2022

Grazia Danti was born in Florence, into a family with a long artistic tradition, descendant of Giulio Danti, architect, sculptor and goldsmith (Perugia 1500 - 1575), son of Pier Vincenzo Rainaldi, who had changed his surname in homage to Dante Alighieri, and his son Vincenzo Danti, architect, sculptor, both in bronze and marble, and painter (Perugia 1530-1576), who worked extensively in Florence and whose most significant works include the Beheading of the Baptist in the Florence Baptistery and Honour Wins Deception in the Bargello Museum in Florence.

Grazia Danti followed an unprecedented personal and artistic path. She still works in fashion and began painting as an adult, inspired by a remarkable sensitivity and innate versatility that is well represented in the works selected for Palazzo Portinari Salviati. Among them stand out faces and forms of women, a heterogeneous feminine, inspired by memories, personal events, suggestions of places, affections, readings, reflections. Strong, free, poetic, seductive, pugnacious, mysterious women with exotic features are the undisputed protagonists of the small and large-format canvases, created using the technique of oil on canvas and raw canvas. 'Farewell to Pearl Harbour' and 'Sweet Warmth', exhibited in the Court of Cosimo I, immediately catch the eye, and then the gaze rests on women from faraway places, from the depths of the landscapes of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Asia, as in 'Waiting', 'Thought', 'Prayer', or 'Iranian Woman'.

donna iraniana 2022

The triptych set up in the Sala Beatrice, 'The Dream', 'Madness' and 'Ecstasy' seems to form a single work, a specially designed installation. In the works executed on raw canvas, such as "Satisfaction", Grazia Danti performs layered brushstrokes and after distributing the colour, she removes it and then adds it again, scratches it, scars it and waits for the paint to dry before working on it again. Through the richness and heterogeneity of the chromatic values, the artist outlines sinuous forms, at times generous, at times angular, decisive, even threatening, as in the emblematic 'Iranian Woman', where a 'warrior' is portrayed with such strong characteristics and personality that she even looks like a man, almost a hymn to all women to fight to conquer their freedom and independence. The series dedicated to the feminine constitutes a true journey by the artist, a path that invites us to take with her and in which mythographic, archaic, historical, autobiographical, "inner" memory, as she likes to define it, and, at the same time, attention to the contemporary, to social events, to current events that are sometimes all too bitter, converge. A painting that, especially in the female subjects portrayed, the protagonists of the exhibition, takes the form of meditated reflection and introspection.

The exhibition takes on the value of a personal emotional and artistic big bang at the same time, capable of suggesting how rebirth can spring from the darkest blackness, through colour and the forms it takes on, thus showing, at the same time, Grazia's path of maturation, as a woman, as a mother and as an artist, between similarities and antitheses, until the authentic knowledge of the self. Grazia Danti has personally taken care of the presentation of the works and their relationship with the surrounding space, as well as the relationship of the works and the space with the light in the exhibition rooms, in order to construct even theatrical effects, and it is, in fact, a rich scenography, moulded by many emotions, that is revealed to the eye of the observer.