Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to present an online summer exhibition of work by the American and Italian artist Lucretia Moroni (b. 1960, Milan).
Moroni has worked as an artist, photographer, and designer in a wide variety of media for over forty years. In the early 1980s, Moroni studied decorative painting, with a specialization in fresco painting, murals, and pattern design, at the renowned Van der Kelen School in Brussels. She continued her training in interiors with the Oscar-nominated designer and architect Renzo Mongiardino in Milan and New York. Since the early 2010s, Moroni has devoted her time to photo-based art, specializing in alternative-process printmaking with precious metals such as gold, platinum, and palladium.
This exhibition features Moroni’s recent palladium photographs, made directly on 22-karat Manetti gold leaf from Florence. In Moroni’s view, gold is a color that is impossible to reproduce, and a symbol of the unattainable, and therefore the Divine.
As a child growing up in Italy, she was impressed by Byzantine mosaics, such as those in Ravenna, where gold is used as a background to represent the sky. Her delicate and painstaking process of working with gold leaf produces unique, luminescent, richly textured images reminiscent of both Italian Renaissance miniatures and Eastern Orthodox icon paintings.
Moroni’s work has been shown in solo shows and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe since the 1990s. Notable commissions include her work with Franco Zeffirelli for the sets of La Traviata and her twenty-four custom-color trompe l'œil murals in the Bethesda Fountain Arcade in New York’s Central Park. Moroni also runs the Foundation Museum of the Palazzo Moroni in Bergamo, Italy, which was commissioned and built in the 17th century by Francesco Moroni. The Foundation houses several works by the great late Renaissance painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520-1579) and is a testament to both the historic heritage of the Moroni family as well as the artistic and cultural life of Bergamo.
