Tintoretto's Daughter - Creatrix magazine

photo: Chris Freeman, 2022

Finissage
November 26
5:30 -6:30pm

Installation viewable: October 27 – November 26

ARTEATELIER is excited to present Tintoretto’s Daughter, a site-specific performance painting and installation by Claire Zakiewicz, during the closing month of the 2022 Biennale of Contemporary Art.

From October 27 through November 27, 2022 Zakiewicz will stage a compelling re-imagining of the story of Tinteretto’s daughter, Marietta Robusti (also knows as Tintoretta).

In 2019, a chance encounter in Venice led to Zakiewicz to stay overnight at Tintoretto’s house, where she conversed with the famous Renaissance artist in the liminal state between waking and sleep. Zakiewicz’s unexpected dream dialogue with Tintoretto inspired her investigation into his relationship with his daughter Marietta and her contribution to his work, her visibility as an artist and the secrets she kept.

The window of the gallery will provide the audience with an extraordinary lens onto an intimate performance, as the artist, blindfolded, channels Tintoretta, through an improvisational performance painting, accompanied by a musical composition produced in collaboration with young women artists. The soundtrack will filter through the public walkway, echoing 15th Century Venetian music, field recordings from streets of Venice, sounds from the work in progress inside the studio and lyrics written by Zakiewicz and her assistants and collaborators.

Incorporating dance, acting and automatic drawing, the artist will create a large-scale performance painting which embodies the flow of time, drawing on the work produced by Marietta in the sixteenth century: expressive portraits in which the dramatic lighting conjures her pioneering spirit. For Zakiewicz, Marietta represents the forgotten and intentionally obscured histories of women artists and their contributions.

Every evening there will be a screening of Zakiewicz’s 2018 performance Perspectives In Motion, a collaboration with Venetian dancer Laura Colomban and Venezuelan performer Mariana Alviaraz.

“When I was doing this performance there was an exhibition of Tintoretto’s work on the other side of Accademia bridge. As I was drawing with my eyes closed I invoked Tintoretto and wondered how I could make art that still inspires 500 years later. The mark-making is a visual expression of movement-based active listening, imagination and attunement to the environment and objects. It’s an inquiry into how our movements continuously and subconsciously change, depending on what we hear, see, imagine, touch and interact with.”

The exhibition coincides with the closing month of Milk of Dreams: the 59th Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2022.

San Marco 3209/A
Salizada Malipiero
30124 Venice, Italy

(1 minute from Palazzo Grassi)

Installation viewable through gallery window at all times from:
October 27 – November 26, 2022

Performance documentation ‘Embodied Patterns’, 2022, Venice (photographer Mark Edward Smith)

Born in London, UK, Claire Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art and Anglia Ruskin University and received an MA from Sir John Cass School of Art while exhibiting and performing widely in London and Bergen throughout the 2000’s. Between 2009 and 2012 Zakiewicz was a member of the ensemble Fig. with composer Alwynne Pritchard and sound artist Thorolf Thuestad, who performed together worldwide. Her works were presented at Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, in the exhibitions Tweet Me Up, 2011 and Label, 2012.

Between 2013 and 2019, Zakiewicz was based in New York. She lived and worked in various artist residencies, including Mothership NYC, PointB Worklodge and Bill Young’s Dance Studio, where she continues to have work on display. During her time in New York Zakiewicz exhibited and performed at venues including The Elizabeth Foundation, NOoSPHERE Arts, Last Frontier NYC, Mothership NYC, Plaxall Gallery, Itinerant Performing Arts Festival and Satellite Art Fair (Miami).

Since 2020 Zakiewicz has reoriented back to the art scene in Europe and has had residencies at Cill Rialaig in Ireland and The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout in Suffolk, England. Now living and working in London, Zakiewicz has recently exhibited with artist/poet Sophie Seita in the duo show There’s no way I can know it, the object or the body at Hoxton 253 Art Project Space. She has been collaborating with many London-based artists and performers including co-authors of the publication Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945, Birgita Hosea and Carali McCall, Simon Tyszko of Resonance FM, improvisational musician Emily Suzanne Shapiro of Mellifera arts platform and actor/writer Dannie-Lu Car. She performed and exhibited as part of the Performance Drawing event and exhibition curated by Ram Samosa Field of Action in 2022.

Her recent essay ‘The Aesthetics of Failure’ was published by Bloomsbury in The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts; Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished, 2020.

Tintoretto’s Advice, 2018
Pastel and watercolour on watercolour paper
29.5 x 51″ (75 x 130cm)

Zakiewicz’s fifth exhibition with Venice-based gallerist Anita Cerpelloni is inspired by the story of Marietta Robusti, the daughter of Tintoretto, who was nicknamed La Tintoretta (the little dyer girl). Since conventions during Robusti’s lifetime (1560 – 1590) dictated that women remained in the domestic sphere and not work as artists, Marietta and her female contemporaries relied on male family members for access to the art world. Despite these limitations, Marietta developed a reputation as an artist in her own right, challenging the subordinate place of women in the arts. Shortly after her death, writer Carlo Ridolfi described her as one of the most illustrious women of her time, having the same manner of skill as her father, while displaying “sentimental femininity, a womanly grace that is strained and resolute.” She developed her artistic skills by hiding her sex, dressing as a boy so that she could go everywhere with her father. Emperor Maximilian and King Philip II of Spain both expressed interest in hosting her as a court painter, but her father refused their invitations on her behalf because he couldn’t bear to part with her. In 1578 he arranged for her to marry a Venetian jeweler and silversmith, Jacopo Augusta, to ensure she would always stay near him. While Robusti worked in her father’s studio some sources relate that she worked on altarpieces as an assistant, dressed as a man. However, many of her artistic achievements were attributed to her father. Some believe that Marietta painted some of Tintoretto’s best works but the only painting that can be conclusively attributed to her is her Self Portrait (c. 1580; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), which depicts Marietta posed before a harpsichord, holding a musical text of a madrigal, “Madonna per voi ardo”. After her early death, the decline in work produced by Tintoretto was ascribed to grief for his daughter, rather than the loss of a skillful assistant.