Anna Valeria Borsari (1943)
Italy

"After humanistic studies and a degree in Literature and Philosophy with a thesis on André Malraux, Anna Valeria Borsari began exhibiting in the mid-Seventies, and at the same time was a professor of Romance Philology at the University of Bologna until '95. Some of her research, conducted starting in '67, on the relativity of our perceptions and on the themes of reference and identity, led her, in 1977, to a new and personal conception of her own work. The distinction between subject and object, form and matter, was being erased, and therefore the boundaries between art and the world also collapsed. With the use of different tools, such as painting as well as photography and video, without necessarily connoting her actions as artistic, Anna Valeria Borsari thus intervened in natural environments and in urban exteriors or interiors, of which her work ended up sharing the precariousness, while it could have remained a photographic documentation or a story; but it could also remain a pictorial representation, understood as a copy of a lost original, in a continuous reference between "a mental space and a physical one" (see Adalgisa Lugli, Places wait to be painted, "Le Arti News", March- June 1984, p. 83). A.V.B. have written various essays, organized conferences and cultural initiatives, also engaging in social activities. In 2006 she moved from Bologna to Milan." (Source, artist's website)