Maria Molteni

Travel notes

Maria Molteni was born in Milan, where she lives and runs her studio.
Her professional track is marked by studies in biology and interest in psychology, music and sculpture. She takes a diploma in piano at Conservatorio of Parma and she goes about with an highly stimulating artistic milieu not only in Italy, but also in Canada and later on in Egypt, countries where she lived for many years. She is favoured to be influenced in the sobriety of her works as well as in her artistic sensitiveness by a family personage: her father in law Angelo Casati, interpreter of the evocative movement of the Italian sculpture between Thirties and Sixties. When her Master Angelo Casati passes away, Molteni unlocks her creativeness, devoting herself to a long and intense apprenticeship in furnaces and quarries. In the Nineties shy starts facing critics and public, collecting not only a large public favour, but she also leaves a positive impression on many critics who decide to support her art in Italy.

From the early works characterized by terracotta and stone, made with a figurative language and strong allusive tension, the artist transits towards an abstract expressivenes , adopting bronze and iron as technical reference material. In the plasticity of her works Maria Molteni pours the energy of her always evolving thinking, which finds in them the place where to reveal itself and to make rationally tangible its essence, much more and above all in quite aniconic figures of current works, where she attains essentiality, as well formal as volumetric. Essentiality which is not to be confused with simplistic content, also because the artist has got to it after calculation, reflection, suffering, studies and experience and, by the way, can represent a summary and also a project of becoming. Actually her artistic discourse is straightforward, firm, it knows its origin and its direction; the path to be done is traced, is marked, is asserted, is engraved with the confidence in her maturity acquired with the patience and the sweetness of the mental and cultural development.

Among her most recent activity we recall the solo exhibitions organized at the Oratorio della Passione, museo della Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio in Milan in November 2005 and at the prestigious Schubert Gallery in March 2006. The same year in November her most recent works, now also larger in size, are shown at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gazoldo degli Ippoliti. In March 2007 is published the volume by Giorgio Mondadori “Lo spirito della materia” edited by Paolo Levi, preface by Giovanna Barbero, where the artist is presented with 20 works and in the following April she exposes at Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria in Turin during the exhibition “La tangibilità del Logos”, cured by Giovanna Barbero.
She is awarded, also in 2007, the prize of Critic at the XIX Edition of Premio delle Arti e della Cultura in Milan and the the first prize at XI Edition of the National Contest of Sculpture Cesare Pavese in Santo Stefano Belbo.

Writings about her artistic production by: Dalmazio Ambrosioni, Giovanna Barbero, Lorenzo Bonini, Rossana Bossaglia, Luciano Caramel, Elena Casati, Tiziana Cordani, Raffaele De Grada, Flaminio Gualdoni, Carlo Franza, Mario Guderzo, Paolo Levi, Angelo Mistrangelo, Clizia Orlando, Giulio Residori, Claudio Rizzi, Gabriella Torricella, Anselmo Villata and Massimo Zanello.

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Works in permanence:

• Museo della Basilica di Sant'Ambrogio - Milan (Italy)
• Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Gazoldo degli Ippoliti , Mantova (Italy)
• Civico Museo Parisi Valle - Maccagno, Varese (Italy)
• Galleria Schubert - Milan (Italy)
• Galleria Scoglio di Quarto - Milano
• Private Collections
• Galleria Emmediarte - S. Stefano Belbo, Cuneo (Italy)