Sono qui [un esercito di donnacce nude] is a book of drawings realized by Doris Maninger in 2013 during a residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in s'Hertogenbosch (Netherlands). A kind of continuous narrative, the drawings represent a concatenation of experienced episodes and references to images from memory. In some cases, they are accompanied by personal notes related to a specific creative moment, and apparently dissociated from the images themselves: perhaps a conscious representation of how memory is nothing more than an endless series of reconstructions that the “present” makes of the “past.”
Ironic and macabre at the same time, the drawings reveal the emotional charge as well as the taste of provocation at the base of the entire work of the artist. These “collateral drawings, sketched out with the carelessness of those who doodle while on the phone or at a conference” can be considered as a “a graphic counter-melody” to the ceramic women crafted by Doris and a leitmotif of her artwork, a kind of daily exorcism to regain the state of purity and concentration which are necessary for the artistic practice.
Her first artist's book, the volume is intended as a complementary element to the exhibition of the same name hosted by Studio Stefania Miscetti in Rome, and at the same time as a small but valuable work in and of itself.
Doris Maninger (born 1958 in Graz, Austria) lives and directs, teaches, draws, models and creates jewellery in Florence, Italy. Before starting to co-direct Alchimia, an important school of experimental jewelry, she studied painting and art history at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste of Vienna and subsequently moved to Italy, to the very South of it, to work as a restorator of fresco, guilding and wood sculpture. She then started dealing and experimenting with different materials and approaches towards restoration, painting, sculpture and textile design, combining traditional techniques with contemporary conceptual developments.