Art like ‘ from the street ‘
About the work of Patrizia Casagranda
The woman is a constantly recurring element in the work of Patrizia Casagranda, whether as a princess, mythological figure, garbage collector or bearer of a certain faith. “I think women are great,” says the Krefeld artist and mother of three daughters in an interview with Jülich gallery owner Pieter Loven 2018. In the beginning, it was fairy tale themes in which they used black and white copies of typical accessories such as shoes, horses or the Frog sprayed, so today it is less the allegories of society (as fairy tales can also be read), but the great, global issues of our time. Equality, justice and tolerance can be read as demands from the dispute with the Indian garbage girls from the Kabelia caste as well as from her series Belief, in which she is about world religions.
Patrizia Casagranda has only been working as a freelance artist since 2016; but since then with great success. Before that, she completed her design studies with a focus on illustration with distinction in 2002 and then worked as a graphic designer for Günther Uecker and Markus Lüpertz, among others. The word, typography in general, its structure and color, but also working in concepts, play a major role in her works of art, a fact that she herself attributes to her first professional as a designer: “You can see above all that I enjoy typography on the background of my work. "
While Patrizia Casagranda initially worked in acrylic and made collages, the multi-layered grid, through which she presses the motif in different colors through a wide-meshed screen, has now become her distinguishing feature. At the invitation of Peter Wilms, with whom she has shared a studio in Holland for 20 years, she traveled to India. There she met the garbage girl from the Indian snake caste, the Kabelia, who left her garbage finds, which she in turn used literally as the basis of her work. The idea of a piece of "wall on the wall" was born, the recycled materials 'from the street', such as truck tarpaulins, jute, fabric, paper or cardboard parts, are "15 to 20, sometimes more." “Layers of painting superimposed, which consists of a mortar-plaster mixture enriched with pigments. In doing so, Casagranda makes use of the artistic breadth that graffiti has to offer. Stencils, grids, sprayed and painted areas can be found next to and on top of each other in combination with type fragments that she takes from different contexts. It can be a poem just like Charlie Chaplin's speech from the film The Great Dictator. The fact that Casagranda uses graffiti techniques without coming from this scene shows how far this artistic counter-movement has made it into the mainstream of the art world. Banksy is not the only example
for the museum passability of this young art movement, Casagranda also proves with her way of working that the transitions are fluid and the viewer has got used to the "used" character of works of art. Casagranda does not come from the street ‘, but she uses her means and methods, which is why she can definitely be attributed to Urban Art. She ultimately came to painting through history, or rather through Roman history: “The paintings in Pompeii can be described as ancient street art. I was fascinated by the aging process of these paintings and used my own technique to transfer them to our times. "
Your compositions have a fascinating effect of depth. Seen from close up, the effect can be compared with the work of the pointillists: the motif looks like an abstract painting made up of raster points, the content of which is only revealed from a distance. The bas-relief, which was created by the multiple application of paint, then fades into the background in favor of the motif, whereas it dominates when viewed from close up. The secret of the luminosity of the artist's work certainly lies in the pigments she uses. According to Casagranda, she bought a 17th century pigment shop in The Hague and was always impressed by the luminosity of these colors. “As a result, my colors have changed for about one to one and a half years.” In doing so, she sticks to her way of working, working on several works at the same time in order to be able to react spontaneously to chance. Sometimes it is a look that inspires her, an advertisement, but also the idea of humanism, of peace and love, which she brings into her work. The Stuttgart native once described her creative process as she is constantly on the move and tirelessly developing.
It also fits that constant further development is very important to her - maybe that makes her work so lively, despite always new topics. With the belief series and also with the diversity series, which were mainly created in 2020/21, she wants to convey a general message: the idea of humanism, which is based on the idea of equal values, as is ultimately the case with the world religions. “Religion was repeatedly used by dictators to legitimize their needs. That is nonsense! All religions have the same values, ”it becomes clear. But it can also be concluded from this that her work certainly has a political message; both her portraits of the garbage girls, who impress in their beauty and the unshakable optimism that they convey, as well as the works of the Diversity series, which exude warmth and strength, and their most recent works, which are inspired by the table setting, based on this but to deal with the consumption of our time. If all people are equal, then we should also pay our respects to the garbage maids who are recycling the affluent waste of the West, and we should question our consumption in general, which is partly responsible for the problems of our time - this is how their artistic message could be summed up.
Dr. Prof. Chris Gerbing Independent curator
