CRUMB GALLERY

The Crumb Gallery in Florence was founded in May 2019 with the aim of promoting, disseminating and supporting the work of female artists working in the field of contemporary art (painting, sculpture, photography, installations, performances). Its aim is to enhance and protect female artistic production in an exclusive way and to help reduce the economic and cultural gap that still exists in a domineering way between male artists and female artists. It is the first gallery in Europe to deal exclusively with women.

The Crumb Gallery project was born from the passion of four women: Rory Cappelli, a journalist for Repubblica who has long dealt with art, travel and culture (Art e Dossier, Carnet, Viaggi di Repubblica, curating catalogues); Lea Codognato, an expert in communication in the cultural field and owner of one of the most important communication agencies in Italy (Davis&Co); Adriana Luperto: a multifaceted artist who has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions of great importance, including the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007); Emanuela Mollica: architect specialized in the field of cultural heritage and museums (Uffizi Galleries, Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Bargello Museums).

Among the artists and photographers that Crumb Gallery represents and promotes are: Letizia Battaglia (Corpo di donna), Elena Berriolo, Cecilia Cosci, Glenda Costa, Lucia Damerino, Sélène de Condat (L’hôpital des poupées), Sophie Dickens, Maria Caterina Frani, Lucy Jochamowitz, Laura Lezza (Floral Tribute), Adriana Luperto, Tina Sgrò, Louises Will. Among the latest fairs in which Crumb has participated are: BOOMing Contemporary Art Show 2023, The Others Art Fair 2024.

Here are the artists who will be protagonists at YouNique 2025:

Adriana Luperto

Adriana Luperto, born in Salento, has been drawing and painting since she was 11. In China she studied traditional watercolor technique on rice paper. In the 1990s she worked on scenography, murals and installations in Lugano. In the following decade she created Lamiere, a series of wax crayons on Moleskine sheets, mounted on medium-sized steel sheets, which she then exhibited in Milan in 2005. In 2007 she participated in the Venice Biennale exhibiting at the 13×17 Italian Pavilion, an initiative curated by Philippe Daverio and Jean Blanchaert.

Adriana Luperto is a refined artist, dedicated to the creation of worlds in which the divine blows. Where everything is silvery, crystalline, delicate, rarefied. His mind, reflected as in an alchemy in his oil paintings, in his watercolors on rice paper or in his pastel drawings, does not dwell on the torments, the anguish, the harshness of reality, not even when he tells its cruelest folds. He always manages to find a note that instills a sense of peace and liberation. This is the case for the streets and squares, but also for the border landscapes: the oils on paper or canvas, empty of people and life, manage to convey the deepest and most metaphysical sense of “being together”, of creating common spaces: in that nothingness of bodies and everyday objects, in those streets illuminated by street lamps or by the moon, crossed by clouds that advance in the air like silent armies, he manages to give a sense of infinite satisfaction.

GLENDA COSTA

Glenda Costa lives and works in Siracusa, the city where she was born. Her creative journey began with the faculty of design and fashion disciplines at the University of Urbino Carlo Bò, where she graduated in 2010. After experiences with designers and stylists, she moved to Ortigia, founding a couple of years later MILK, a clothing brand with strong Sicilian influences. Sicily, a captivating land, full of stories to discover, pushes her to tell her story through natural elements, creating a collection of clothes inspired by local plants and mythology using only organic materials and manual artisan techniques. The leaves of palm trees, papyrus, prickly pears, protagonists of the dress, are imprinted through a simple technique of immersion in dye and pressure on soft and clean linen cuts. Then she moves on to ancient linen sheets, forgotten, sometimes even stained: but precious, unique, unrepeatable and intimate. The secret listening to the essence of her land leads her to experiment, in addition to the imprint of plants, also that of fish and dry stone walls, which she transforms into poetry with stones marked by the strength of embroidery. In September 2023 she exhibited for the first time at the Crumb Gallery presenting the project Liturgie siciliane.

LUCY JOCHAMOWITZ

Lucy Jochamowitz Garibaldi was born in Lima, Peru. After studying at the Faculty of Art of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, she continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, graduating in 1983. She held her first solo exhibition in 1983 at the Ivonne Briceno Gallery in Lima. In 1989 she exhibited works on paper at the Bishops’ Palace in Pistoia and in Japan, in Hammatzushi, at the Yamatsumi Gallery. After the XIX Biennial of Ljubljana and an exhibition at the Casa de America Havana, in 1995 she was invited to represent Peru at the XLVI Venice Biennial with the installation of Umbris idearum, a large fresco with a projected cone of light: the large skirt that she would explore in subsequent works. In 2000 she participated in the exhibition The word and the image at the Pecci Museum in Prato. In 2005 she exhibited A contraviento, a paper boat surrounded by hawthorn branches, at Tessilform in Prato. In 2008, at the Rodolfo Siviero Museum in Florence, she presented L’ospite, a dialogue with works from the collection. In 2013, in addition to participating in several group exhibitions, she exhibited Verso casa (Galleria 2.18 in Fano), in 2016 Picaflor/madreflor ICP-NA Lima, in 2018 Mirar oltre (Galleria Susanna Orlando, Pietrasanta) and in 2022 Casa frágil (Sala Inca Garcilaso in Lima). In 2024 she created the project “Building the House” for Crumb Gallery.

Her works, whether paintings, drawings or sculptures, are imbued with the magic of her homeland, pervaded as they are by a strong feminine matrix that leads back to ancestral images. There are eyes, there are arms, there are women’s bodies, there are streams, red ramifications that look like veins where blood flows, and they all inevitably arrive at a house, almost as if it were the womb that created everything, where everything begins. In the project “Building the house” the walls are made of many drawings, in ink and tempera on rosehip paper, which depict arms that intertwine, single arms, that reach out to each other, that almost seem there to protect its interior.

SOPHIE DICKENS

Sophie Dickens, great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, lives between Italy, Liguria to be precise, and Great Britain. A graduate in art history at the Courtauld Institute, Sophie Dickens decided to learn the practical aspects of sculpture, attending the School of Art, aided by a meticulous study of anatomy, learned in real clinical dissections (for artists) at the anatomy department of University College London. She was the first winner of the Founders’ Prize for figurative sculpture in 2007 with the work entitled The Turning Man, freely inspired by Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, which was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Many large-scale sculptures are exhibited in public and private collections or created for events such as the 2012 London Olympics: for the occasion she created a work that reproduced, on a large scale, a judo move. In Italy she has participated in many exhibitions, such as the one in Turin that featured a pack of wolves made with recycled chestnut planks: recycled wood, like that of the barrels she used together with the metal of the hoops for a pack of wild boars, is a material used very often by Dickens. For the municipality of Pieve di Teco (Liguria) she created the monumental sculpture Hercules and the Lion with medieval larch planks from the restoration of the Teatro Salvini received as a gift in 2020.

Sophie Dickens tries to give her personal interpretation of the theme of the Apocalypse with the project created, with the coordination of Crumb Gallery, for the Tuscany Region and for an exhibition that was held in the gallery: a large sculpture, two meters high, the great knight with his fiery red horse, brandishing the sword: War. Great Apocalyptic Knight. Along with this sculpture, always on the theme, Dickens created other small sculptures depicting the four horsemen, ink drawings on paper, preparatory studies. These are works in which you can perceive the echo of the horses of the great battles, such as that of San Romano painted by Paolo Uccello. On the theme of the Fallen Angels, Dickens then created small sculptures that fall from the sky, works that allude to the “apocalyptic” moment that the whole world is experiencing at this moment.

Request contact