Giulia Cenci’s Post-Apocalyptic World

Every time Giulia Cenci makes an artwork, she creates a world. Impure elements – fragments, leftovers, ruins – take centre stage: ciphers of the past converging with Cenci’s vision of the future. The Italian artist, who lives and works between Tuscany and Amsterdam, repurposes unwanted materials. Inspired by the discarded farmyard machinery she witnessed growing up in the Tuscan countryside, Cenci scours scrapyards for elements with which to compose her large-scale sculptural installations. She covers these found objects in materials such as resin, silicone, plaster and wax, manipulating her findings until their original shapes are enhanced, or stilted, beyond recognition. Cenci’s touch acts like a warped acceleration of time, as if her adjustments and alterations to these objects are themselves a force of nature.

Anthropogenic, post-apocalyptic: in her own words, Cenci’s installations are ‘invasive’, as she noted in a 2020 interview with Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence. To walk below, above, beside or through one of her works is to engage with an orchestration of space, a sci-fi vision, spilling out like the red vegetation grown by Martians in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). Since she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 2012, Cenci’s work has evolved with a fascination for ‘the clash between human civilisation and its environmental context.’ When we speak, she notes how her work stems from ‘what I observe around me, a reaction to what I love and hate about the reality that surrounds us’.

In halfweg (2018), for instance, she was inspired by the delicate twisted compositions in Tree Roots (1890) by Vincent van Gogh, captivated by the surging force in his brushstrokes of electric blue. She found herself covering disused car parts and hollow scraps with similar hues, hanging them at human height for the audience to navigate like a surreal jungle.

In the same year, her installation field (2018) hung amid real trees in the Netherlands, creating a horizontal tension of aggregated globular compositions in the vertical forest flora. Like remnants of an alien invasion, these sculptural elements crisscrossed the natural environment, fused with their surroundings, while undermining them at the same time. Installations like ‘fango’ (SpazioA, Pistola, 2020) and ‘territory’ (Art Basel, 2019) exposed the artist’s emerging fascination with fragmented cast forms of ashen creatures along with twisted knots of tubes and wires, while in marine snow (scuro-scuro) (2019-20), a pair of legs, dislocated from a body, walks alone across a darkened floor.

In 2019, Cenci won the 21st Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel and, in 2020, she was shortlisted for the MAXXI Bulgari Prize. Her installation, lento-violento, cascaded down from the ceiling of the MAXXI museum in Rome on metal wires, four distinct scenes overrun by fragmented body parts: a dystopian conflict, a contortion of hybrid cyborg creatures, in which human, beast and machine worlds collided and confronted each other in equal measure. A dog’s muzzle merged with a human head; casts of the staunch hindquarters of a horse hung in duplicate rows, reminiscent of a military line up or a butcher’s shop window.

Like Leonora Carrington – the surrealist artist and author from whom this year’s Venice Biennale takes its title, ‘The Milk of Dreams’ – Cenci rejects the idea of a polite society in which art serves as a pleasant pastime. Instead, she recognizes its potential to disrupt and disturb, to remind people of the dust to which they shall return, their material connection to the earth. ‘I can’t stand to see the work as an object to be contemplated in an overly perfect space,’ she notes, ‘[it] creates too great a detachment […] We live in a complex and organized world within which our once-wild body is forced to move.’

In Carrington’s short story The Debutante (1937), a hyena attends a ball by disguising itself in human clothes, then killing and eating a housemaid to use her face as a mask. Unable to keep the beast within under control, however, the hyena discards its costume, the theatre of society undermined, and nibbles at its own face. Cenci’s work resonates with a similar unveiling and unleashing of an internal primitivism – an inability to conform, disguise or hide itself. In lento-violento, a goggled human face is latched to the back of a canine body, leashed and ready to walk, paws outstretched. Last year, in her exhibition ‘backland’ (2021) at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, Cenci went further, presenting ‘self-devouring figure’ (2021), a repetitive series of hybrids, all staged in the process of devouring their own dislocated bones. This year, I’m anticipating yet another new world from this evolving artist at the Venice Biennale: the wild body set free once more.

Giulia Cenci's work is on view at the 59th Venice Biennale from 23 April to 27 November 2022.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 226 with the headline ‘4 Artists to Watch 2022’. For additional coverage of the 59th Venice Biennale, see here.

^{Main image: Giulia Cenci, fango, 2020, installation view. Courtesy: © the artist and SpazioA, Pistoia; photograph: Carlo Favero}