Dopo la Fine

Margherita Manzelli creates haunting, oddly ravishing images of solitary women. Her meticulously crafted paintings and delicate works on paper imagine wan, languid, at times emaciated or subtly deformed female characters isolated within an abstracted, pictorial dream space. Almost always seated or otherwise recumbent, the mute, still women are engaged in no activity other than staring, their penetrating eyes locked in a weirdly knowing confrontation with the viewer. Manzelli’s spectral women seem painfully aware of the fact that they are on display. Her characters are often attired in or surrounded by colorful, richly detailed clothing and textiles. Importantly, the artist does not work from photographs and does not use models—the figures and their environments come entirely from her imagination. Although this figure does resemble the artist, Manzelli does not consider her work to be self-portraiture.