Materiality—that loaded term designating works that change the way we think about the physical aspects of art. We’re sometimes blind to the personalities of paint, stone, or canvas, or what constitutes the being of painting and sculpture. However, artists like Sara Enrico open our eyes to these relationships. Of course, she’s not the first to enter this conversation, which has been progressing for several centuries (see Peeters, Klein, Rauschenberg, and Fontana, among many others) to the extent that this material focus is no longer necessarily a required descriptor for someone’s artistic practice. There’s something humorous in the fact that when used in contemporary press releases and wall text, ‘materiality’ often suggests a show containing artworks of literal material (fabric).
Enrico’s work does indeed use fabric; however, she plays with the material’s quality of having a shape that is based on what it covers, mediated by the properties of the material itself. Or is it? On closer inspection it’s actually concrete and pigment. Belying expectation, her works offer us new ways of viewing artistic propositions of being, shape, colour, erosion, and manufacture. Her work poses questions that shift along formal lines as her objects react against each other along physical ones: distance, reaction to light and shade, geometry and then latterly along the lines of definition. Her work makes us resume our connection to the physical realm, the tangible, and the topic of materiality. Following her lead we move beyond the obvious.
Sara Enrico, The Jumpsuit Theme, 2024. Concrete, pigment. Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare Milano/Pescara. Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Installation view of Sara Enrico, Unearth Desires, Vistamare, Milano, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Vistamare Milano/Pescara. Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Exhibition Notes: Sara Enrico – Under The Sun, Beyond The Skin
For the seventh edition of the Furla Series program, Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano announce Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin: a solo exhibition by Sara Enrico, curated by Bruna Roccasalva.
Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin is a site-specific project which, for the first time since the collaboration between Fondazione Furla and GAM began, will be developed exclusively in the outdoor spaces of the Villa Reale gardens, providing new scope for interaction between contemporary art, the natural landscape, and public spaces.
Sara Enrico is an Italian artist whose sculptural research revolves around notions of materiality and corporeality. All of Enrico’s work deals with the notion of “transition” as well as constant experimentation and the mixing of languages to explore the relationship between the surface or “skin” of the object and its form and material substance. Integrating approaches from tailoring, choreography and architecture, the artist combines materials such as concrete, pigment, fabric, and steel in configurations that evoke a latent vitality and articulate a fluid relationship between body, clothing, and space.
Sara Enrico, RGB (skin), 2015. Sublimation printing on polyester, foam. Photo Günter Richard Wett
Sara Enrico, Mirroring, 2016 (detail) Bronze, neoprene, silk thread and polyester. Installation view of Open Studio, Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milano, 2016. Photo: Virgina Taroni
Sara Enrico, Twins, 2014. Oil on canvas and on wall. Installation view of Greater Torino, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, 2014. Photo: Cristina Leoncini
Sara Enrico, Intermezzo, 2019. pigment printing on photographic paper, aluminum. Installation view of Focus Sara Enrico.The Jumpsuit Theme, Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Mart, Rovereto. Photo © Archivio fotografico e Mediateca Mart, Alessandro Nassiri
Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin presents a series of new productions designed specifically for the unique context of the Villa Reale parklands, stemming from a reflection on the garden as a place where nature is functional to the landscape design: a human construction, modelled and designed according to aesthetic, philosophical or social canons, where natural elements and cultural superstructures intertwine.
Starting from this dualism between nature and artifice, Sara Enrico has created “a landscape within a landscape” through a series of sculptures that inhabit the garden without seeking to mimic it but, on the contrary, triggering a subtle tension between the plant kingdom and an idea of synthetic vitality, between what arises spontaneously and what is the upshot of a deliberate gesture. Ever a place of representation and reflection, the garden becomes a sort of stage on which the artist’s works confront the surroundings in a relationship of unstable equilibrium, playing with the continuities and frictions between work, environment, and viewer.
This project represents the seventh event in the Furla Series, the exhibition cycle that Fondazione Furla has been developing since 2017 in partnership with major Italian art institutions, featuring an all-female program designed to celebrate and promote the contributions of female artists to contemporary culture.
Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin was born out of a long-standing partnership between Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, one that began in 2021 and involves a series of annual exhibitions where contemporary art interacts with the museum’s spaces and collection.
Sara Enrico, The Jumpsuit Theme, 2023. Concrete, pigment. Installation view of Never Fading. Density and Lightness in Contemporary Italian Sculpture, Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Vistamare Milano/Pescara. Photo: Giuliano Vaccai
Sara Enrico (Biella 1979, lives and works in Turin) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, before specialising in the restoration of ancient paintings at the Spinelli Institute in Florence. Winner of the 2018 New York Prize, she was artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. In 2021, she received the Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT Italian Fellowship in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. She has exhibited at prestigious institutions both in Italy and abroad, including: Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2024–25); Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto (2024–25); OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin (2023); 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Národní galerie Praha, Prague (2019); Mart di Trento e Rovereto (2019); OFF Biennale Cairo, Cairo (2018); PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Turin (2017); and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014).
Sara Enrico, The Jumpsuit Theme, 2019 Installation view of Focus Sara Enrico.The Jumpsuit Theme, Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2019 Courtesy of the artist and Mart, Rovereto Photo © Archivio fotografico e Mediateca Mart, Alessandro Nassiri
Sara Enrico. Under The Sun, Beyond The Skin. September 16 – December 14, 2025
Furla Series. Curated By Bruna Roccasalva. Promoted By Fondazione Furla And GAM – Galleria D’arte Moderna, Milan
www.fondazionefurla.org
www.gam-milano.com
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
