ANA SEGGIARO

REPRESENTED ARTIST

Tending relations between geographically distant cultures and, at the same time, stressing the temporal gap that separates them, is the meaning of Ana Seggiaro's work, based on the engravings of Alberto Dürer, Piranesi and Albinus. For the artist, European art is the paradigm that she has built, from that training she has resignified her works, submitting them to her consideration and leaving an embroidered mark that marks a different path from the one originally created.
In the process of creation, she takes the images that interest her, investigates its history, answers questions such as what the artist wanted to say or if she simply made it by chance. The next thing is to photograph it and modify it digitally, either by adding color or removing details to create a collage. Once the final image has been decided, a print is made on fine art canvas to begin the hand embroidery process. In the last year, in addition to embroidering, she has decided to paint over the image.

Ana Seggiaro was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Initially pictorial in nature, in its different stages, her work was exploring and incorporating new materials and media that complemented the oil and engraving that are the basis of its origin. She graduated in drawing and engraving from the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts in 1988.

ARTWORKS

The Anatomy Series

Seggiaro's fascination for the human body, for the movement of the muscles, the bone structure, and the circulatory system coexists perfectly with the arteries of red linen, with the spills of silk and the textile vapors that Seggiaro infuses into these open bodies.
In his series, the thread plays multiple roles and acquires different meanings. On his characters, the embroidery sometimes resembles a surgical seam or becomes the circulatory system of a dissected body, a fantastic intervention capable of reviving the exhumed bodies of the Dutch anatomist Bernhard Sigfried Albinus.

Durero series

Ana Seggiaro's training as an engraver awakened her fascination for the works of Durero and Piranesi. This leads her both to recover the language of engraving itself through other media and to appropriate and dialogue with the works of these artists. This conversation, however, does not start from a solemn, pristine, or untouchable place, but from the recognition of her virtues, thus allowing her to operate, rebuild, eliminate, and retouch fragments to compose her own work. Starting from pre-existing works of hers, Seggiaro builds a kind of mimicry of the original pieces in an exercise of visual reconstruction that she uses as a structure for her production. But the works are just that, states altered by her gaze that resemble, without repeating, the original piece.

The Piranesi Series

The ambitious exercise of working with techniques such as large-format embroidery only exacerbates the perfection of detail through the change of scale. What was once the page of a book is transformed to bring the dimension of the minuscule closer to the observer. This arouses curiosity and evokes primordial feelings that oscillate between existential anguish, the passage of time, life, death, intimacy and eroticism.

The Cartographies Series

In the mid-2000s, Ana Seggiaro made her first small-scale collage works on paper. Starting from pages of books, maps, and scores, she carries out the first series intervened through embroidery and painting. In these works she finds the universe of cartography, using maps as supports for the construction of imaginary geographies. This search leads her to tackle larger works. Thus, she recovers old school maps worn by use, where the black rubber acquires a broken texture, generating a topography like that of skin dried by the sun. She intervenes in these maps with abstract figures and images of paper airplanes that fly over unknown landscapes.

The Partituras Series

Seggiaro is part of the textile field in an unconventional way, from a non-technical but expressive approach. In exchange, he obtains freedom of action from the needle that allows him to tie, knot, leave half-sewn stitches, and generate volume through the thread. In this way, she makes use of non-traditional uses of embroidery that respond to a more plastic than textile thought.