Lugano
Mirella Bentivoglio, born on March 28, 1922, in Klagenfurt, Austria, to Italian parents, dedicated her life to the exploration of photography, language, and artistic experimentation. After spending her childhood in Milan, she studied English at the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, earning certificates of language proficiency. From a young age, she expressed her creativity through poetry, writing in both Italian and English. In 1943, at just twenty years old, she published her first poetry collection, Giardino, edited by Giovanni Scheiwiller.
In the 1950s, her artistic research took a new direction, evolving into a dialogue between image, sign, and word. In 1958, she participated in the Salzburg Seminar for American Studies, which sparked her interest in art criticism. In 1963, she published a monograph on the American artist of Lithuanian origin, Ben Shahn, released by De Luca. During the 1960s and 1970s, her practice increasingly focused on the fusion of verbal language and imagery, aligning with the international neo-avant-garde movements of the time. She explored areas such as concrete poetry, visual poetry, and visual writing, experimenting with wordplay, semantic fragmentation, and intelligent irony. In 1968, she published her second poetry collection, Calendar, and that same year obtained a teaching qualification in Aesthetics and Art History for Italian art academies. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1971 at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan, followed in 1973 by a retrospective at the Galleria Pictogramma in Rome. In the years that followed, she expanded her artistic research to include performance, action poetry, and environmental poetry, also creating large-scale public art installations such as the renowned Ovo di Gubbio (1976). During this period, she also redefined the concept of the artist’s book, crafting some from stone to lend them a sense of material “immortality.”
In the 1990s, Bentivoglio received major recognition in the United States, with exhibitions at the MoMA in New York and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Her works are now part of the permanent collections of leading American institutions. In the new millennium, her exhibition activity intensified, with shows in Japan, Italy, and the United States. In 2011, she donated her extensive archive on women’s art to the Mart – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, making a significant contribution to the preservation and promotion of women’s artistic legacies. A tireless advocate for female artists, Bentivoglio curated numerous thematic and international exhibitions focused on the role of women in art and culture. She passed away in Rome on March 22, 2017. Today, her work continues to be exhibited in cultural institutions and museums around the world, affirming her enduring legacy.
