From Feb. 2 to Aug. 20, the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo – Center for the Study of the History of Textiles, Costume and Perfume, is offering “Tramalogie. The Donation of Anna Moro- Lin,” an exhibition curated by Chiara Squarcina, sponsored by the City of Venice – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, just over two years after the artist’s passing.
Lidense, but Ligurian by origin, Anna Moro-Lin was among the great protagonists of Fiber Art, the Textile Art developed from the twentieth century thanks also to the French artist Jean Lurçat, who drew on tapestry. As early as 1920 at the Bauhaus they were experimenting with the use of fibers and materials such as artificial silk, metal, cellophane, and chenille in the discipline of weaving, all trends that gave rise thirty years later to Fiber Art proper. The actual creative boom, however, was in the 1960s/70s when this art form reached its highest and most disparate forms of expression.
On June 23, 2020, Anna Moro-Lin had donated a nucleus of 20 of her works to the City of Venice, allocating them to the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo, Center for the Study of the History of Textile, Costume and Perfume.
“Anna Moro-Lin’s art has been consigned to history thanks to this donation, says Foundation President Maria Cristina Gribaudi. Who qualifies the Donation as “An absolutely generous act that will give the opportunity, to those who want it, to get to know an important chapter of Fiber Art and grasp the developments and characteristic figures of this artist from Lido coming from an ancient Venetian family that has always supported and valued culture and its diffusion.”
“The creative entity of Anna Moro-Lin allows,” Chiara Squarcina, curator of the exhibition and Director of the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo, as well as of the Fortuny, affirms, “to grasp the absolute value towards textiles that, thanks precisely to Fiber Art, is cleared through customs and rises to a ductile material for original artistic expressions.
“This is a milestone that also recognizes the willingness of the Palazzo Mocenigo Museum to continue as a Study Center. In fact, the donated works allow for cross-readings with respect to the other Fiber Art collections also kept at Palazzo Mocenigo. We also cannot forget that the main exponents of this artistic current were born and developed in the lagoon area, then contaminating national and international realities.”
“This monographic exhibition allows to deepen, not only the creative figure of the artist but also her evolution understood as overcoming the limits that circumscribed the expressiveness linked to Fiber Art. Today these works are a decisive piece for the understanding of the general mapping of languages that feel more and more pressing the need to intersect and interact with reality and a bold and as much as ever possibilistic visionaryness.”
“With Anna Moro-Lin, tradition is not denied but rather assimilated and surpassed to translate reflections and psychological introspections anchored in contemporary feeling, unease, loneliness, and the search for a recognition of the ‘self’ that is no longer found but can, somehow, intertwine with the material fiber to reconstruct a credible and truthful identity,” the Director adds.
The itinerary runs through twenty rooms on the first main floor, doubling the exhibition areas opened in 1985. A new section dedicated to perfume has also been created with five dedicated rooms, where multimedia tools and sensory experiences alternate in a path of information, emotion, and insight.
The environment as a whole evokes different aspects of the life and activities of the Venetian patriciate between the 17th and 18th centuries, and is populated by mannequins wearing precious antique clothes and accessories belonging to the Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume (now Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto, del Costume e del Profumo), attached to the Museum. Fashion and costume, with particular reference to the history of the city, thus characterized the Museum’s research and exhibition activities from the very beginning, in the environmental context of the Mocenigo’s noble palace.
The activities of the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo, in addition to focusing on the enhancement of the textile heritage through guided access and study of the artifacts preserved in the warehouses, will be devoted to the study of the collection of Storp bottles, which, given on long-term loan to Fondazione Musei Civici, will allow to increase the narrative support of the section dedicated to perfume. In view of the prestige of this nucleus, specific initiatives in collaboration with MAVIVE will also be proposed.
