Milan based artist Francesco Vezzoli is the winner of the 2001 Blinky Palermo Grant of the East German Savings Bank Foundation for the Free State of Saxony. His embroideries dealing with stars and divas from the fields of film, advertising, fashion and television constitute an important body of work in addition to his film and video works. Vezzoli addresses both the glamour in which his models are shrouded, as well as the related solitude and the transitory nature of fame.
In his works, Vezzoli refers to culturally standardized themes, as well as social, medial and formal elements. These are employed as a reservoir of fragments of reality fuelling personal myths. The masterfully embroidered portraits combine two diametrically opposed worlds: a private/domestic craft and the stars’ aura of glamour. The act of embroidering becomes a metaphor of a type of obsession located somewhere between the extremes of a contemplative means of appropriating reality and a love of detail. In his embroideries nostalgic memory and a distanced, removed stance are forced into a critical reciprocal interrelationship.
Vezzoli’s exhibition in Leipzig was planned in conscious view of the concurrent show “Gee…how glamorous” – Andy Warhol: Stars and Theatricality, and presents embroidered portraits of stars that refer explicitly or more generally to Warhol’s world. For Vezzoli, Warhol, with his almost obsessive fascination for stardom and glamour, is prototypic of a means of dealing with and instrumenting a ‘star myth’. Vezzoli realised a series of portraits especially for this exhibition in collaboration with New York star photographer Francesco Scavullo, known above all for his pictures of models and film stars before and after putting on their makeup, including Brooke Shields, Cindy Crawford amongst others. Francesco Vezzoli is the object and motif of one such double portrait. Scavullo, who already worked in the 1970s as a photographer for the magazine ‘Interview’, published by Warhol, shows in his reserved black-and-white portraits two different faces of the artist, revealing through their direct juxtaposition a multifaceted portrait of Francesco Vezzoli.
Accompanying the exhibition, the book “The Needlework of Francesco Vezzoli” (Hatje Cantz Publishers ISBN 3-7757-1255-0) will be published.
