Elisabetta di Maggio. Frangibile

Hosted in the rooms on the first floor of the Museum, the exhibition traces the artist’s career as it has evolved. It presents historical works alongside new productions, specially conceived for the spaces of the GAM.

Carving itself – a hallmark of Di Maggio’s artistic process – is a form of exploration of the material and a violent gesture that rends it irreversibly.

Her works enchant the viewer. She produces vast walls of tissue paper the size of rooms, finely engraved by hand; Marseille soaps incised with a scalpel to form maps of vast urban agglomerations; glass mosaics and wax micro-mosaics resting on fragile, airy supports; porcelain as thin as sheets of paper; delicately balanced plant elements whose structures are revealed through fine carving; and regular overlays of postage stamps forming hypnotic mandalas. The artist creates images in which the boundary between figuration and abstraction is so permeable that it confuses and, at times, unsettles us.

The journey begins and ends with two works distant in time. One is Annunciazione, from 2025: two enlarged dragonfly wings in oxidised copper, an allegorical wish for every new journey to be undertaken. The other is Desiderale, a video work from 2006, in which the slow cutting of a 35 mm film strip’s tail creates the shimmering of a starry sky—symbolising the tension that links, etymologically as well, the act of desiring with time and sidereal space.