EVA ANTONINI

Eva Antonini was born in Rapperswil (Switzerland), the place of her childhood and adolescence. As a young girl, Eva reveals a natural proneness for moulding clay, matter that later will be privileged in the creation of sculptures of medium and large dimensions.
From 1981 to 1985 she lives in Geneva, where she takes her first steps in the working world, simultaneously pursuing her linguistic education, enriched by a series of journeys and stays in England, Italy and United States with stops in the Middle and Far East.

In 1985 she moves to the Canton Ticino (Italian speaking part of Switzerland) with the intention of refining her linguistic knowledge, particularly in Italian and English. From 2002 she ultimately plunges into the passion and choice of an artistic life. Along the way she acquires fundamental knowledge on such matters like clay, plaster, alabaster and marble. Together with specialization courses, she attends studios of master sculptors such as Oreste and Antonio Quattrini, Giorgio Eros Morandini, Giovanni Cimatti and Ettore Greco.

In 2003 she takes part in the first collective exhibitions and in 2005 she is the recipient of a Prize for sculpture at the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence.
In 2006 she receives her first commission for the creation of an openair bronze sculpture, soon followed by other engagements. She donates several sculptures for charity auctions and social institution. In 2010 and 2012 some of her work is chosen for the exhibition at the Carrousel du Louvre, headed by the National Fine Arts Society of Paris.
In 2018 she officially inaugurates her new and very sizeable studio. The same year she receives a Critics Award by ArteMilano. In 2020 she is commissioned by the local authorities to create a bronze sculpture for a new plaza near Lugano, Switzerland.
Her expository curriculum of solo and group exhibitions ranges from Switzerland, to Italy and Spain and from France to the United States.
Her research continues relentlessly, enhanced by the participation in international exhibitions and symposia, which will challenge her artistic stimuli, while she is stepping up her game in front of creation. Her creative activity becomes more and more impetuous and exhilarating, mainly during.

VITAE

The possibility to transfer her ideas and emotions into the material almost obsessively pervades her. A torment alternated by euphoria, especially in front of a completed work, followed by the impatience and ardour to start a new creation. Volumes, harmony of forms, the body’s language, fragility, mystery and expressiveness fascinate her more and more.
While working with materials such as marble, alabaster and plaster, her profound and almost ancestral attraction always and regularly leads her back to clay, which despite its toughness, has her predilection.

Her artistic exploration contemplates the fleetingness of the moment, the transience of life, the metamorphosis between present and past. Following this central theme, Eva Antonini creates body and face fragments, which carry the marks of time, the scars of life.
Fragments representing some sort of Life Maps.
The body as the soul’s “translator” into the visible!

Her human and expressive experience could be summarized in one of Goethe’s aphorisms: “There is no surer way of evading the world than by Art; and not better way of connecting with it than by Art.

“Eva gathers in her works a profound notion of the human body, of its precise metric dimension; a well known, but at the same time concealed and hidden anatomy.
Bodies and faces come to us fragmentary, not entire, but somehow disrupted. Disrupted as often is our life; disrupted in its dreams, feelings, human and spiritual paths. From these disruptions, from these emotional struggles and torments, from the non definition we can hear the story, we can feel it; it is in front of us, communicating. Eva tells it silently, her sculptures’ lips are closed, not shut, not still.

Those lips talk to us, since the eyes cannot; those lips tell us the story of the silent lands which Eva Antonini has seen or lived, even though only in her dreams or in other lives; she depicts them to us in all their grandeur”. Elisa Polidori, art critic and historian (original version in Italian)