Lugano
Elisabetta Gut was born in Rome in 1934, but spent her childhood in Zurich, where she had her first contact with contemporary art, frequenting museums and breathing the atmosphere of Dadaist, surrealist and abstract circles. At the age of seventeen she moved to the institute of the Ursuline nuns in Rome, distinguished by her determination, an intelligent rebellion and, above all, by her strong artistic skills. In 1953 she enrolled at the Institute of Art of Rome and later at the School of Nude of the Academy of Fine Arts, completing her training in 1956.
Her first works followed a post-cubist pictorial language, but among drawings, pastels and watercolors she already saw the seed of a sensibility close to the neo-avant-garde verb-visual. Gut began to experiment with the relationship between image and writing, creating collages and assemblages with textual fragments and natural elements.
The pivotal encounter came in 1956 with Felice Casorati, who supported Gut by organizing her first solo exhibition at the Cairola Gallery in Milan. Two years later, she exhibited again in Milan at the Lo Zodiaco Gallery. During the 1960s, she immersed herself in an increasingly radical material and conceptual exploration: she altered surfaces, incised canvases, and combined lace and embroidery in a poetics of ironic rebellion and expressive freedom. Her works blended natural and cultural elements—branches, flowers, shells, and threads—with musical notes, calligraphy, and poetry. Thread, which she used not only as a binding element but also as a symbol of erasure or a musical staff, became a hallmark of her visual language.
Gut was also a prominent figure in the feminist movement, joining the Rivolta Femminile group founded by Carla Lonzi, alongside artists and intellectuals such as Carla Accardi and Simona Weller. Mirella Bentivoglio took a deep interest in her work, writing numerous critical texts and inviting her to many of the exhibitions she curated.
Her work has been featured in major exhibitions including: Materializzazione del linguaggio (Venice Biennale, 1978); Arte come scrittura (Rome Quadriennale, 1986); Fotoidea (São Paulo Biennale, 1994); and Post Scriptum: Women Artists in Italy between Language and Image in the ’60s and ’70s (Ferrara Biennale Donna, 1998). Her works are held in the permanent collections of MUSINF in Senigallia, MART in Trento and Rovereto, Centro Pecci in Prato, MA*GA in Gallarate, MRAG in Milan, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.
In the spring of 2019, the Repetto Gallery dedicated the exhibition Threading Spaces to her work, alongside Franca Sonnino, Maria Lai, and Nedda Guidi.
Elisabetta Gut passed away in Rome on May 16, 2024.
