Over the course of nearly twenty years, critics, curators and journalists have approached Lea Gramsdorff’s visual work from different perspectives. Across their writings, certain figures, spaces and materials recur — the room, the everyday object, the word, the map, memory — taking on different forms and meanings over time.
This selection is neither a press review nor an attempt to reduce the work to a single interpretation. It brings together a number of readings that have accompanied its development, allowing continuities, transformations and different points of view to emerge.
Per Luglio Kaputt e sentimenti prêt-à-porter, 2005
In Gramsdorff’s first solo exhibition, Roberto Mura identifies a territory in which painting and poetry, reality and imagination, feed into one another:
“Poetry inspiring painting, painting inspiring poetry.”
In the works he finds images, evocations and writings, but above all figures who “live in an endless dream,” almost always with their eyes closed.
His reading also brings out themes of solitude, alienation and contrast, while everyday life appears permeated by an inner, imaginative dimension.
La Cagliari di Lea, 2008
Giorgio Pellegrini focuses on the way Gramsdorff looks at and transforms the city. It is a view from above, static and contemplative, far removed from the dynamism of Futurist aerial views: almost “like the dream of a daydreaming bird.”
In this recognisable yet transfigured Cagliari, Pellegrini draws particular attention to the relationship between perception and emotion:
“A kaleidoscope of emotions that transform reality without erasing it.”
It is an “acute northern gaze” directed at a Mediterranean city of dense architecture, light, palm trees, sea and human presence. The landscape remains real, but passes through a personal lens that alters its distances and relationships.
Dal Nulla, 2010
For Maura Picciau, Dal Nulla is at once a vision of the creation of the world and a reflection on artistic creation: a “taut and unified pictorial narrative” in which a universe takes shape.
At first, the planets appear suspended in rarefied, solitary worlds. Then the distance between the cosmos and everyday life begins to narrow: the planets arrive at the table, the world can take the form of a plate, and household objects become protagonists in small stories.
Picciau observes a secret and subtly unsettling life within apparently silent interiors. The plate and the soup, darkness and light, water in the bathroom, stars at lunch bring Creation into the domestic realm.
The human presence, too, is reduced, anonymous, fragile — culminating in a self-portrait constructed through an absence, marked in red.
Creation thus proceeds without monumentality, through matter, irony and continual shifts of scale between the immensity of the world and the most ordinary things.
Apollo 18, 2011
In Apollo 18, Maurizio Memoli reads the void not simply as a background, but as an element that determines the relationship between rooms, objects and thought:
“Lea’s rooms suspended in the immense void…”
Everyday objects — chairs, newspaper fragments, skies, sea, light — can appear enormous or infinitely distant. Fine lines connect them, creating inaccurate, unrepeatable perspectives.
For Memoli, space takes shape through “subtraction, reduction, absence, void.” Yet the void does not coincide with perfect order: filaments, ideas and words remain, traces of a “pre-creative chaos.”
The works thus measure the difficulty of reducing to a single rational thought the anxieties that continue to inhabit the material realities of everyday life.
Buy Buy Butchery, 2011
In her text on the collective project Buy Buy Butchery, Licia Lisei devotes part of her analysis to the RICORDI: containers, fragments and recovered materials that evoke lost lives not through representation, but through memory.
“Each RICORDO manifests itself as a poetic object, not mimetic but evocative, a source of emotion and pathos, an occasion for meditation.”
Against the seriality of codes and numbers stand names, familiar names and nicknames: against quantity, the unrepeatable uniqueness of every living being.
“The RICORDO makes relics sacred, passes down the name, preserves the ‘TRACE’ of the animal’s passage through life […]”
Fragment, name and relic thus become instruments against oblivion.
Exodus, 2013
With Exodus, the map becomes one of the sites of Gramsdorff’s research. Inés Richter identifies something in the work that goes beyond the representation of movement:
“Lea Gramsdorff takes on the difficult task of undertaking, on an artistic level, an ‘attempt at orientation’ within the field of tension between staying and leaving, between homeland and the unknown.”
The map does not simply indicate a route. It becomes a place where belonging and departure, what is left behind and what one moves towards, can coexist in tension.
70 Solitudini e un Coro, 2015
In the work created jointly with Simone Dulcis, Efisio Carbone identifies a direct relationship between musical language and visual construction:
“Within Simone Dulcis’s informal structure, which we might well describe as tonal, there are small isolated figures, accompanied in some cases by archetypes of everyday life — individuals finely traced with the tip of the brush by Lea Gramsdorff, who constructs melodic lines for these minute compositions.”
The seventy isolated figures find their completion in the seventy-first work: a concert hall awaiting the protagonists encountered before. Solitude and the collective dimension become parts of the same composition.
Lexikon, 2017
With Lexikon, the relationship between word, image and object becomes explicit.
Efisio Carbone observes how chairs, tables, lamps and other small domestic elements can trigger associative processes. The words belong to personal experience, yet establish connections between the individual and the world.
Raffaella Venturi approaches the same work from a different perspective, calling it a:
“visual primer”
Gramsdorff works with a limited number of words, “probing both within and outside herself.” Nouns and verbs become small three-dimensional works that Venturi interprets as possible “stations of meditation.”
Between word, object and experience, an open space remains in which meanings can continually shift.
Elegia, 2018
Writing about the installation created by Lea Gramsdorff and Simone Dulcis in the Crypt of Santa Restituta, Alessandra Menesini first emphasises the quality of the interventions:
“Powerful yet delicate.”
The path through the installation crosses a place marked by history and death through colour, objects, ex-votos and a large canvas.
“Extraordinary is the sensitivity with which the dust of oblivion is shaken away, the past becomes vivid, and hearts open to the light.”
Here memory takes on a historical and collective dimension, tied to the place and to the people who have passed through it.
Exodus 4, 2019
Seven years after the beginning of the Exodus project, Raffaella Venturi observes how the nautical charts have become:
“maps of a humanity on the move and without peace.”
Tiny figures cross surfaces in which the boundaries between land, water and sky have disappeared. Their meticulous repetition produces no spectacle; instead, Venturi recognises a silent and reflective quality in the work:
“[…] it does not seek to provoke amazement, but to make us perceive a humanity that is never at rest […]”
Come d’autunno, l’autunno - Lebenslaub, 2020
In Come d’autunno, l’autunno - Lebenslaub, the material of memory becomes the material of the work. Childhood photographs, documents, letters, pages, fabrics and fragments belonging to the artist’s life are transformed into leaves.
Alessandra Menesini describes the installation as:
“a poetic and disarming installation.”
And adds:
“It is not a reckoning, but a contemplative gaze at the succession of personal and professional moments.”
Efisio Carbone likewise rejects a purely nostalgic reading of memory and identifies the transformation of personal experience as one of the work’s central elements:
“It is the imaginative power of art that transforms personal experience into a shared condition: I am humanity made of flesh, fragile and strong at once.”
The personal archive thus becomes the material of a new transformation.
Waving Goodbye, 2022
In Waving Goodbye, geography becomes explicitly biographical. The windows created by Gramsdorff are placed along a map of the Castello district in Cagliari, as the artist leaves the place where she had lived for many years.
Venturi describes them as:
“poetic nuclei of intimacy, micro-stage sets beyond the windows […] little theatres of intimacy, only faintly revealed by certain recognisable silhouettes.”
House, figure, space and theatre meet in the minimal form of the window, while the map records both a place and a passage.
In his presentation of the exhibition, Efisio Carbone finally widens the perspective to Gramsdorff’s work as a whole:
“An astonishing coherence runs through Lea Gramsdorff’s entire production as a visual artist, a process that will only be fully clarified by a future retrospective.”
This is Carbone’s reading, not a conclusion imposed by this selection. But it raises a question that reaches back across nearly twenty years of texts: how do forms, materials and projects change while certain images continue to return?
The figure, the room, the object, the word, the map, the journey, memory, the home.
Not a closed vocabulary, but elements continually set in motion.
Notes & Sources
1. Roberto Mura, “Il sogno tra colore e forma”, Il Giornale di Sardegna, 8 December 2005. Text relating to the exhibition Per Luglio Kaputt e sentimenti prêt-à-porter.
2. Giorgio Pellegrini, text for La Cagliari di Lea, 2008 calendar, Arti Grafiche Pisano.
3. Maura Picciau, “Mentre Dio riposa”, text by the curator for Dal Nulla, 2010.
4. Maurizio Memoli, “Apollo 18. Lo spazio mancato”, presentation text for Apollo 18, 2011.
5. Licia Lisei, “La Macelleria dell’Arte / Buy Buy Butchery”, text relating to the collective project Buy Buy Butchery, Fabbric.Art – Ricerca ad Arte, Rome, 2011.
6. Inés Richter, text by the curator for Exodus, 2013.
7. Efisio Carbone, presentation text for 70 Solitudini e un Coro, 2015.
8. Efisio Carbone, text by the curator for Lexikon, 2017; Raffaella Venturi, “Il sillabario visivo di Lea”, L’Unione Sarda, 1 December 2017.
9. Alessandra Menesini, “Elegia, omaggio alla memoria di Cagliari”, L’Unione Sarda, 25 September 2018. Exhibition Elegia, curated by Efisio Carbone.
10. Raffaella Venturi, “‘Exodus 4’, le carte nautiche di Lea Gramsdorff come tracce di un’umanità senza pace”, L’Unione Sarda, 28 March 2019.
11. Alessandra Menesini, “Le foglie della vita di Lea Gramsdorff”, L’Unione Sarda, 21 January 2020; Efisio Carbone, “Lebenslaub — Una corsa della vita”, text by the curator for Come d’autunno, l’autunno - Lebenslaub, 2020.
12. Raffaella Venturi, “‘Waving Goodbye’, un saluto a Castello”, L’Unione Sarda, 21 September 2022; Efisio Carbone, presentation text for Waving Goodbye, 2022.