Francesco Vezzoli

Galleria Franco Noero, Torino

Acquired from the above by the current owner in 2004

_______________________________________

Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

Acquis auprès de cette dernière en 2004

Doha, Qatar Museums Authority Gallery, Francesco Vezzoli, The Museum of crying women, 6 October - 30 November 2013

_______________________________________

Doha, Qatar Museums Authority Gallery, Francesco Vezzoli, The Museum of crying women, 6 octobre - 30 novembre 2013

A quintessential example from an early series of embroidery works, Veruschka Will Arrive Shortly defines Francesco Vezzoli's fascination with popular culture and his love for the embroidery technique, revealing the artist’s penchant for glamour, nostalgia and life’s intrinsic sorrow, regardless of wealth or fame.

In the early 1990s, Francesco Vezzoli studied at Central Saint Martins in London, when the Thatcher era had only just ended, the YBA artists were beginning to assert themselves and the London nightlife scene was at its peak. In this lively and inspirational context, the artist placed his practice in the revival of embroidery, a lonely, decorative craft widely associated with the women's sphere.

The present work belongs to a series of embroideries coinciding with Veruschka Was Here, a performance at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 in which the top model Veruschka von Lehndorff – an icon of 70s fashion – made her come back to the stage after many years of silence. Lying on a sofa, she contemplated an embroidery hoop printed with her face at the climax of her career in 1969. The performance retrospectively presented the legendary supermodel and defined Vezzoli's relationship with his dreams and their incarnation in symbolic figures.

The needle works are among Vezzoli’s most popular and visually powerful bodies of work. The act of embroidering becomes a metaphor for his fascination located between the appropriation of reality and a keen attention for detail. In the process of getting closer to his divas, the artist discovered that many of them were doing needlepoint as a technique to remove themselves from the public, to escape their audiences, their fame and their public persona. Francesco Vezzoli approaches the embroidered portraits as a study of the feelings, obsessions, and melancholy that do not transpire from the surface of the glittering world of show business, but are its aching core. "Universal are the tears, the pain, which is the theme at the root of everything I do," says the artist. "When the memory of the characters that appear in my works is lost, when they are a seemingly nostalgic mass of incomprehensible information, the only thing that will be legible [...] will be the pain, the despair they represent.”

The artist addresses both the glamour in which his models are shrouded, as well as the transitory nature of fame and its related solitude. Masterfully sewn, Veruschka Will Arrive Shortly is a portrait that combines two diametrically opposed worlds: a private, domestic craft with the ultra-glamorous aura of celebrity. The black and white embroidery depicts the top model with iridescent white tears outlined in soft pink running down her cheeks and converging into a shimmering gold tear lying upon her chest. Compared to Vezzoli's other embroideries, the aura of the present work stands out both in its canonical pose and in its attire. With a strikingly intense gaze, Veruschka acquires a hieratic sense of regality, recalling the majestic Flemish portraits or the ruff portraits of the Elizabethan era. In 2013, the work was exhibited at the artist’s first Middle East exhibition "Museum of Crying Women” at the QMA Gallery in Doha, Qatar.

Contemplating truth, beauty and the afterlife, with the present work Vezzoli acts out a Warholian fascination with the world inhabited by celebrities, embracing and incorporating it into the fabric of his investigation. Veruschka Will Arrive Shortly represents the link to a forgotten past and an obsessive scheme of desires. With its finely embroidered tears, the present work is an iconic example of the beauty staged in Vezzoli’s nostalgic and imaginary world, which forges a new role for the artist himself among the legends that crowd his fervid imagination.