Introduced by Adam Budak

Architecture as a costume? Body as a space? Fabric as a volatile skin of a humanoid being? Sara Enrico’s biomorphic structures perform the decaying corporeality of our surrounding by constructing psychosomatic hybrids that reanimate the senses and activate the intensity of physical experience. Her site-specific and quasi-parasitic project in the National Gallery's Presidential Lounge The Jumpsuit Theme is the artist’s attempt to negotiate the spatial materiality in-between the painting and the object, in the increasingly grey zone of illusory volume and the omnipresent flatness.

Enrico's work unfolds an idea of a collapsed form versus the dream of a solidity, keeping in mind the art's ethical vocation. The artist’s cloth paintings and painterly objects mimic the autonomy of meaning and perception, thus foregrounding an intimacy of a substitute and proxy. Her compositions are anti-monuments of corporeality, caught in a post-historic moment of physical exhaustion and decline:  pseudo-figurative collages of bodily fragments, damaged skin-like surfaces, piled en masse and abandoned, decomposed memories  of grande narratives, fading away in a disciplined age of an auto-correct device. Neo-baroque and futuristic, these are theatricalized versions of a new anthropology for a synthetic world of fake history and amnesia. Enrico reimagines body in a post-human era of surgical experimentation, provoking a thoughtful reflection on the bioethics and the anatomy of morals.

Sara Enrico (born 1979 in Biella/Italy, lives and works in Turin) studied at Accademia di Belle Arti in Turin and at the Istituto Spinelli in Florence (faculty of restoration of ancient paintings and frescoes). In 2013, she attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts with Matt Mullican at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como. She has had residencies at Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’arte in Poirino with Jason Dodge and Raimundas Malasauskas (2015), and, earlier, at VIR-viafarini in residence in Milan (2012). In 2017 she was visiting professor for Polito Design Workshop at the Politecnico di Torino. In 2018 Enrico was a recipient of the grant of the IV edition of Italian Council promoted by Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries (DGAAP). In 2017/2018 she received New York Prize as artist-in-residence at International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York.

Sara Enrico has exhibited her works in Italy and abroad, including Marsèlleria, New York, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Les Instants Chavirés, Montreuil; and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, amongst others. She participated in OFF Biennale Cairo, Cairo, 2018 and in Biennale Internazionale Arte in Memoria, Sinagoga, Parco Archeologico di Ostia Antica, Ostia (Rome), 2017.

She is co-founder of Laboratorio del Dubbio, cross-disciplinary project, acting as a collaborative platform for artists, researchers and writers (Turin, 2016) and a member of Progetto Diogene, an international residency program of talks and workshops (Turin, 2008-2012).

Sara Enrico. The Jumpsuite Theme is realized in collaboration with Mart - Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto.

Project winner of the 4th edition of Italian Council (2018), a competition conceived by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries (DGAAP) – an organism of the Italian Ministery for Cultural Heritage and Activities, to promote Italian contemporary art in the world.”

National Gallery Prague - Trade Fair Palace (Veletržní palác)