RxArt Visits Maurizio Pellegrin

Last Friday, RxArt visited the sunlit studio space of Venetian-born artist Maurizio Pellegrin, who graciously showed us around. During our visit, we got a glimpse of several current projects as well as a fascinating tour of his source materials, which have included vintage top hats, photographs, canes, suitcases, and Japanese obis.

Combining groupings of cultural artifacts and remnants with systems of numerology and textiles, Pellegrin seeks to manipulate and build on the “energy”, or the accrued history, ownership and contextual details, of these personal effects.  Much like the city of Rome’s construction atop a foundation of Etruscan ruins, Pellegrin’s objects become layered with historicity as he uses older items to form his own new visual vocabulary. His site-specific installations have been placed on walls, floors, and furniture in museums and locations throughout the world, including Peggy Guggenheim’s Collection in Venice, mosques and cultural centers throughout Istanbul, the Fort Wayne Museum of Modern Art in Indiana, and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. We’ll be featuring more of Pellegrin’s studio, work, and discussion with RxArt in an Artist Talk video feature soon.

See below for some shots of Pellegrin’s studio and some of the fantastic objects we found there!