WORKS
A LIFE DEVOTED TO ART.
SKETCH MUSEUM, PIETRASANTA
Biography
Biography
Elena Mutinelli - Sculptor (b. Milan 1967). Since her teens she attended in Milan the studio of Gino Cosentino, a sculptor of Sicilian origin, pupil of Arturo Martini, who passed on to her a love for marble and form. In 1990 she graduated in Sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts with professors Alik Cavaliere, Andrea Cascella, Lidia Silvestri.
Grandson of sculptor Silvio Monfrini, creator of the monument to Francesco Baracca in Milan and a pupil of Ernesto Bazzaro, he deepens his study of sculpture starting from tradition, gradually strengthening the development of his expressive research with an innovative, mature approach within the contemporary scene; the recent installations are an expression of this.
In the wake of figurative tradition, Mutinelli’s work conveys a vigorous, dramatic plasticity: the human body, and especially the hands with their gestures, are the protagonists of her research, supported by a technical approach of great expressive power. In 1990, she moved to Pietrasanta to learn marble technique. Later, between 1992 and 1998, she worked between Milan and Pietrasanta.
In 1992 Elena Mutinelli was selected by the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano to take on the role of sculptor for the Cathedral Works; a commission that remained active until 2005 for the faithful reproduction of the Duomo’s sculptures and ornaments in Candoglia marble, carved by Mutinelli in her own studio, without the mediation of craftsmen or 3D lasers, to replace the originals: spires, finials and flying buttresses, worn by time. In the same year she also began collaborating with the historic Milan art gallery Compagnia del Disegno, founded by Giovanni Testori, which opened her path in art by including her among a circle of top-profile artists such as Igor Mitoraji, Giuliano Vangi, Varlin and Giò Pomodoro, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Zoran Music, Andrea Martinelli, Giovanni Frangi, Velasco Vitali. Mutinelli’s works were chosen to represent the exhibition “Forty Years of Sculpture”, curated by Alain Toubas.
In 1998 she moved permanently to Milan, a city that offered her the opportunity to collaborate with other prestigious historic and avant-garde art galleries. In the same year Giorgio Segato brought together sculptures and drawings from a decade, curating an important public solo show, “Hands on the Body”, an exhibition in honor of the season of Wagnerian Concerts at Dawn, under the Patronage of the University of Salerno at the Cloister of Villa Rufolo, Municipality of Ravello, Salerno.
In these years, Mutinelli begins her professional career in Milan’s most important institutional exhibition spaces, where she appears alongside the great sculptors of the 20th century; these are the beginnings of her career as a sculptor. She is the youngest artist included in the historic exhibition set up at the Museo della Permanente, entitled “Drawings for Sculpture”. In that context she meets the art historian and critic Raffaele De Grada and other figures from the art criticism of the historical and contemporary avant-gardes, who will later follow her work.
In the years that followed she developed her own expressive strength, outlining the bold contours of her direction: the place of the body is a field that still gives her much to say; it is alive, it throbs, it goes beyond the conflictual dialectic between tradition and modernity. Hers is an almost virile plastic physiognomy, both in the sculptures and in the large-scale drawings.
From 2003 to 2005, the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo assigns her the role of leading the stonemasons’ workshop at the Opera Prison (MI), teaching them to faithfully reproduce, from the original model, the sculptures and ornaments of Milan Cathedral.
In 2012 he moved his studio outside Milan. These were years of intense work, fully devoted to sculpture, exhibiting in solo and public institutional shows.
In 2014 she won the international competition “DonnaScultura | 12th edition”, curated by Valentina Fogher and Chiara Celli. Together with Carla Marchelli, Majd Patou Fathallah, Inger Sannes, she is one of four international sculptors to be given a solo exhibition in the Cloister of S. Agostino in Pietrasanta.
In 2015, the Pietrasanta Department of Culture and the Tuscany Region invited her, as a professional sculptor, to take part in a project in collaboration with the Alabama Cultural Council (USA). Mutinelli brought her sculpting experience to the United States by teaching American professional sculptors how to work the marble from the Sylacauga quarry, the same used for the White House.
In honor of the Marble Festival in Sylacauga, USA, he carved on site an elaborate sculpture directly in marble without a model, titled “Hic et nunc”, currently on permanent display in the public collection of the Sculpture Museum at the Library, Sylacauga, Alabama, USA.
In the same year, Elena Mutinelli is invited by Auburn University in Alabama to give a lecture entitled “The workshop in the Italian Renaissance”. During the meeting, the artist explores the meaning of the workshop as a central place for the transmission of artistic knowledge, both during the Renaissance and in her personal experience. Mutinelli emphasizes how her path has, from the very beginning, been closely tied to an active attendance of workshops: first in Milan, when still a teenager she approaches the world of sculpture, and later in Tuscany, where she comes into contact with the craftsmen of local art studios.
In particular, the sculptor explains how, thanks to a direct relationship with stonemasons of extraordinary skill and with internationally renowned artists, she was able to refine her technique and develop a personal expressive language. The workshop environment, described as a space for exchange, learning and growth, thus emerges as a key element in Mutinelli’s training and artistic evolution, in perfect continuity with the Italian Renaissance tradition.
In 2016, the city of Monza dedicates to her a museum retrospective exhibition, at the Civic Museums of Monza, curated by Dario Porta, “In the most taut silence”, an exhibition layout that brought together her most significant works with the aim of setting the museum’s stone monuments from its collection in dialogue with her own sculptures, drawings and carved panels, highlighting—through affinity and contrast—the symbolic values of contemporary sculptural representation.
The second decade of the 2000s ends with a solo show curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, titled “We, not even damned”, around seventy works exhibited in the heart of Florence at Etra Studio Tommasi, the studio where Benvenuto Cellini cast the Perseus.
A round table, a convivium of characters with caricatural expressive incisiveness that, by relocating and transfiguring metropolitan physiognomies, moving from character to character from late Humanism to the Renaissance, find their identity again (perhaps…). “In those faces I find again the grotesque and the absolute of our fathers and Us, not even damned, orphans of heroes…E. Mutinelli”.
In 2021 she was invited to work on a monumental marble piece in honour of the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of Rosso Fiorentino’s “Deposition”. At the request of the exhibition’s scientific committee, Elena Mutinelli brings to life “Manifesto Principle”, a work inspired by the altarpiece of the great Mannerist, born from the dramatic power of the master’s Deposition. Mutinelli translates the original gestures of Rosso’s altarpiece into a sculptural vision of cyclicality in which the end is the beginning, where tradition and contemporary art know no boundaries.
The work “Manifesto principio” was exhibited at the Civic Art Gallery of Volterra, exhibition venue of Rosso Fiorentino’s Deposition, in honor of the show “Rubeus et Alii”, curated by Elisa Gradì and Antonio Natali, and was then acquired and permanently installed in the city of Chiaramonte Gulfi in Sicily, with the opening inauguration curated by Andrea Guastella.
In 2022, at the invitation of Professor Vittorio Sgarbi, he exhibited at the show “Canova between innocence and sin”, curated by Beatrice Avanzi and Denis Isaia at the Mart Museum in Rovereto, a marble work inspired by Canova.
He currently works with the Barbara Frigerio Art Gallery, the Gian Luigi Giudici Foundation Museum, Lugano, and the Etra Studio Tommasi Art Gallery (Pietrasanta and Florence). He has worked with the Après-coup Arte contemporary art gallery in Milan, the Marini Art Gallery (Milan), MAG Marsiglione Arts Gallery (Como and Kyoto), S. Eufemia Art Gallery (Venice), S. Maurizio Art Gallery (Venice), Compagnia del Disegno Art Gallery (Milan), Cappelletti Art Gallery (Milan), Franco Senesi Art Gallery, Positano, and the Entroterra Art Gallery (Milan-Brescia), Marieschi Art Gallery (Milan-Monza).
Elena Mutinelli digs, enters the material, grasps its vitality in the anatomical tension of bodies, with the strength of one who knows matter, first and foremost marble, worked without the mediation of laser machines, and almost always without a model.
[“His sculpture embodies the human presence faced with its own predatory nature, as life itself does. His works express the venturing into man’s potential; powerful sculptures, contracted anatomies grappling with the everyday intentions of existence”] – ( quote by Giorgio Segato, in “Hands on the Body”).
[“Muscles always defined beneath the web of veins that seem to give them blood and, with it, fire”] – ( quoted from Alfonso Pluchinotta, in “Encounter and Embrace in 20th-Century Sculpture from Rodin to Mitoraj”).
Elena Mutinelli’s works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in prestigious institutional museum venues such as the Museo fondazione Giudici, Lugano, the GAM Galleria di Arte Moderna di Catania, the Mart di Rovereto, the Museo Pinacoteca di Volterra, Palazzo Monte di Pietà, Padua, the Piano Nobile del Caffè Pedrocchi, Padua, the Palazzo Reale, Milan, the Musei civici di Monza, the Museo di Scultura della Library Sylacauga, Alabama, USA, and the Palazzo della Permanente, Milan.
Elena Mutinelli’s recent exhibitions place her within the most significant international art scenes, in direct dialogue with the great names of internationally renowned modern and contemporary art, alongside leading masters of both the historical avant-gardes and the contemporary, as in “Encounter and Embrace in 20th-Century Sculpture from Rodin to Mitoraj”, curated by Maria Beatrice Aituzi and Alfonso Pluchinotta, with: Auguste Rodin, Salvador Dalì, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Luciano Minguzzi, Ernesto Bazzaro, Francesco Messina, Arturo Martini, Igor Mitoraj, Sorel Etrog, Pietro Canonica, Elena Mutinelli, Novello Finotti, kate kollwitz, Cleas Oldenburg, Rainer Kriester, Hans kastler, Jorge Borrás llop; and in “Essentially the Hand”, curated by Franco Bassetto, Alfonso Pluchinotta, Annamaria Sandonà, with: Cesar, Joan Miró, Breton, Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalì, Daniel Spoerri, Mimmo Paladino, Novello Finotti, Elena Mutinelli, Lorenzo Queen, Patrizia Guerresi; and as in “Canova Between Innocence and Sin”, curated by Beatrice Avanzi and Denis Isaia, with photographers and sculptors Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Antonio Canova Igor Mitoraj, Miroslav Tichý, Jan Saudek, Joel-Peter Witkin, Dino Pedriali, Alinari a Luigi Spina, Mustafa Sabbagh.
From the outset Elena Mutinelli has gained deep artistic professional experience, lived with passion, rooted in an interest in research, experimentation and knowledge of materials, turning to Art with the choice to create the Unique Work personally sculpted.
Elena Mutinelli’s works enjoy wide recognition from the public, galleries, museums, and institutional venues. These organizations have devoted to the artist both solo exhibitions and highly prestigious group shows, highlighting the value of her sculptural path and the acclaim gained within the contemporary art world. Elena Mutinelli’s sculptures are part of major international private and public collections, including a selection of the most significant leading collections:
Chiaramonte Gulfi, RG, “Principle Manifesto”, public work, monumental marble sculpture placed in the city, sponsored by Mondial Granit S.P.A.
Work created at the request of the exhibition’s scientific committee and shown in 2021 in honor of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Deposition by Rosso Fiorentino at the Pinacoteca Civica di Volterra, curated by Antonio Natali and Elisa Gradi.
Collection Gimoka Coffee Group, commission.
Sculpture Museum of the Library, Sylacauga, Alabama, USA, statuary marble sculpture “Hic et nunc”, museum collection.
Museum of Sketches, museum collection, Pietrasanta.
Aunt’s Collection, Denver, USA.
Collection Dragan ButanGas Group, commissions Elena Mutinelli a sculptural work: the founder’s hand with the shield depicting the ButanGas Dragon.
Municipality of Reana del Royale (Udine), monumental public marble work, Fior di Roccia del Timao. monument Empty of joined hands
University of Art History of Siena with the work In the Arena, collection of the University, specialization in Historical-Artistic Heritage.
Collection Jolly Hotel Madison Towers, New York, USA over one hundred graphic works.
Collection Owens Corning, works commissioned from Elena Mutinelli. The Corning collection sculptures were exhibited the same year alongside the precious paintings of “Antonio Guardi- Elena Mutinelli” and other important antique works at the Museo Lo Studiolo, Milan.
Elena Mutinelli is currently a lecturer in Artistic Anatomy at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and teaches the preparatory course at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, in Milan.
He taught Sculpture and Sculpture Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata and the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts of Genoa.
He has also given lectures and seminars on the art of sculpture and marble working at various Italian and international universities, including Auburn University (Alabama, USA).