Biographical Note
In Kikki Ghezzi's artistic practice, painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, writing, printmaking, artist's books, embroidery and textiles traditions flow effortlessly. Different media and tools nurture each other along with a diaristic element suffused with a visionary quality and a total dedication to art. Ghezzi's life unfolded in distant places: Italy, New York City, Kenya; and then more recently Cornwall, Scotland and especially Ireland: all places linked in various ways to the Celtic culture. The constant motifs in her work are home, identity, rebirth, dreams, memory, and above all nature, fueled by a kaleidoscopic set of potential linguistic references and the cyclical return to currents of symbolism, surrealism and Land Art. From the start of her creative process, the artist's focus on painting was accompanied by a performative aspect that gave absolute importance to gesture and the body. These explorations were soon followed by experiments in the refined delicacy of textile books and the implement of the briefcase. Although internationally trained in law, she turned her energy full-time to art after settling in New York City, where she studied with Larry Poons at the Art Students League and with Garth Evans at the New York Studio School. In 2007 Ghezzi enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she received the Speier Foundation Award, and was awarded a Fine Arts degree with highest honors (2011). It was at this point that the generous teachings of artists such as Emily Mason and Albert Kresch led Ghezzi along a new artistic path. A fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 2011 (and again in 2012) allowed her to work obsessively on dream-based autobiographical and psychological motifs, as well as to nurture her passion for the world of astrology. To express this inviolable game between dreams, emotions and feelings on the one hand, and reality on the other, Ghezzi coined a well-chosen expression: "An alternate dream reality."
Her continuing dialogue with Nature finds its first concrete expression in Radici/Roots exhibited in Bormio, Italy (2014), followed by Sich einwurzeln/Radicarsi/Grounding (2015), in the border city of Glurns, and by the residency A Year with Children (2016) at the Guggenheim museum in New York. Relying upon memory as inspiration, the artist then shares spiritual and metaphysical realities in La 24 Ore: Court of Memory, exhibited at I.F.A. NYU in New York (2015) and more recently at the Italian Embassy in Washington D.C. (2017). Her narrative construct gave rise to the creation of various artist's books: Luce, a book reflecting on the spirituality of colors, exhibited at Centro San Fedele in Milan (2017), and Frammenti exhibited at the Italian Embassy in Washington D.C. (2017). The artist's communion with Nature continues with Chi ("house" in the Cornish language), a Land Art installation, which tells a story attuned to the ancient lunar tidal rhythm in Cornwall - a place recognized as a locus of the origin of art, life and enlightenment. The selection for Il Premio Città di Treviglio (2018) preceded the project Il Ciliegio Magico/The Magical Cherry Tree (2018-2020), presented at Villa Firenze, the residence of the Italian Ambassador in Washington D.C., which explores the theme of Nature and place in an ideal dialogue between two cherry trees whose roots symbolically touch despite being thousands of miles apart. Ghezzi artist's book phase has had an important sequel during the past 15 years with the ongoing project My Cosmic Clock, a sequence of poetic pages in which visually harmonious kaleidoscopic images alternate with enigmatic alchemical and cosmological symbols (2011/work in progress). Here, for the first time, the dialogue between the written word and the visual component has become close and systematic. Parallel to this, a personal measurement of time emerges in the series Gorgeous Nothings (Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland, 2025), reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's unique fragmented envelope poems. The eight impressions of light and a briefcase dedicated to the poet are exhibited for the first time at the 5th Biennale Internazionale Donna in Trieste (BID, 2026). Thus, in Ghezzi's work, time, poetry, light and color take part in a complex and fascinating system composed of corresponding energies, luminous colors, planetary transits, and subtle bodies, in accordance with her passion for using different media.