Maria Cristina Carlini

The volume, which accompanies Maria Cristina Carlini's one-woman show, presents a selection of about thirty works produced by the sculptor from 1998 to the present day.
The work of Maria Cristina Carlini is focused on an idea of geometric essentiality. She has rediscovered the rhythms of the ancient intarsias, but also the triangular and rhomboidal forms, like dream kites, of certain archaic or primitive decorations.
The upward, and one would be tempted to say ascetic, thrust entailed in these linear tensions infuses the sculpture with a new rhythm. The interpenetration of painting and plastic work, a constant characteristic of Maria Cristina's output, has now found new inflections. We are dealing here with a sculpture that does not weigh on the ground, but tends to become light and to project itself into the air, or to be set against a wall without resting on it.
The serial character of these works is transmuted into a musical repetition: like the notes of a score, the individual tesserae, the single modules, are set one next to the other to form a musical chord. But, on close examination, each of the units is different from the next (if only in the diversity of the material, the patina, the mark impressed on the surface). Thus the individual nature of the single parts is preserved.
What we see, therefore, is a sort of magic, totemic object, that makes use of geometry, but without canceling out the oneiric and poetic qualities of the sculpture. Which is always, before all else, earth. And it conserves the earth's values of womb, fertility, fecundity, of the primary and ancient brick, even though eveything is translated into a mental design. (Elena Pontiggia )

Maria Cristina Carlini, born in Varese, started to work with pottery in the early seventies at Palo Alto in California, where she took a specialization course and practiced for two years. In 1975 she continued to work while teaching the art of throwing pots on the wheel in Brussels, where she had moved in the meantime.
Returning to Italy in 1978, she worked for a year in the ceramics studio of the painter Concetto Tamburello before opening her own studio in Milan, on Via Ciovasso.
In 1983 she held a one-woman show at the Rocca di Angera. The following year she took further specialization courses at the Californian College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, San Francisco. Returning from the United States, she opened her studio, called Le Terre, to the public with an exhibition of recent works in 1985. In 1986 she showed at the Galerie Le Rencontre in Brussels and in 1989 had a stand of her own at the Arte Fiera Ceramica trade fair in Bologna, as well as participating in a joint exhibition of sculpture at the Museo Civico of Reggio Emilia.
In May 1990 she held a one-woman show entitled Il colore delle terre (The Color of Earths) at the Museo della Civica Raccolta di Terraglia in Cerro-Laveno Mombello (Varese). In 1991 she took part in a joint exhibition at the La Bottega dei Vasai gallery in Milan. The following year, with a presentation by Elena Pontiggia, she participated in Découvertes 92 at the Grand Palais in Paris, at the invitation of the Christine Colmant Art Gallery in Brussels, where she was to hold a one-woman show the next year.
In 1998 she exhibited at the Galleria Romeo Sozzi in Milan and was invited by Elena Pontiggia to take part in the 25th Premio Sulmona. In May 2003 she exhibited at the Galleria Borgogna in Milan.