Marion Baruch

Viasaterna hosts its first exhibition entirely dedicated to the work of Marion Baruch (Timisoara, 1929), continuing the collaboration with the artist that began in 2018.

Born in Timisoara to parents of Hungarian origin, Baruch grew up in a highly unstable political and social context, ideologies that deeply marked her education, poetics and artistic development. She has been passionate about art since childhood, drawing every day even as a war refugee in the Romanian countryside. Her inclination, especially towards painting, led her first to Bucharest, then to Jerusalem, where she studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and finally, thanks to a scholarship, to the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where she explored different artistic languages and completed her training. In the 1970s she moved back to Italy, to Gallarate, where, with the architect Carlo Moretti, she designed the modernist villa in which she lived for decades. This experience of design stayed with Baruch for a long time and brought her closer to the world of design and sculpture. From 1993 to 2010 she lived in Paris, where she worked on projects also related to relational art. And then back to Italy.

The core of the new exhibition project is a selection of textile works from the last decade of the artist’s production, between 2012 and 2023, including some never before seen. Among the more than twenty works on show are Teatro and Teatrino, both from 2013, whose form is inspired by stage architecture; Schwerkraft (2018) and Oranjegekte, Follia Arancione! (2023), on show for the first time. The exhibition culminates with Meccanismi di Precisione per Sculture (2022), a never-before-exhibited series in which fragments of fabric are suspended in open showcases and enter into a dialogue with the surrounding space, eventually becoming an integral part of the artwork.