Biography
Angela Barretta lives and works in Naples. Since 1997, her artistic research revolves around the themes and forms of Neapolitan popular religiosity. Beliefs, rituals and superstitions, dating back to ancient Greek and Christian traditions, permeate her work and merge into it with their own symbolic power: in the sculptures of objects recalling the body and the tools for its handling, embellished and enhanced by a clever and subtle capacity of reinterpretation; in the performances and in the photos, where the flesh becomes sublime instrument of communication, scream of pain and joy, metaphor and sign of existence. The body is always at the heart of Angela Barretta’s work, a matter which is modifiable, dominating, sanctified in its being irreducibly alive and pulsating, energy exceeding and determining thought. A sensitive and shrewd interpreter of the most atavistic traditions of faith and popular devotion, her works are imbued with suffering and spirituality, carnality and asceticism, a necessary and due manifestation of identity, a statement of belonging: the supreme liberation/appropriation of the deepest roots.
