A Nodo Mio

Curated critical essay by Paola Stroppiana

Grazia Varisco (Milan, October 5, 1937) is a defining figure in twentieth-century art history, the only female member of the seminal Gruppo T, alongside Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, and Gabriele Devecchi—companions from her school and academy days. Gruppo T—the “T” standing for Tempo (Time)—was a movement born from kinetic and programmed art, investigating visual perception, retinal persistence, the transformation of images through motion, and their metamorphosis via light interference and spatial diffraction.

The group was central to the international exhibitions of Programmed Art, which toured cities such as New York, London, Trieste, and Venice, under the auspices of Olivetti and with the support of Bruno Munari and Giorgio Soavi. Since the group’s dissolution in the late 1960s, Varisco has continued her experimental practice independently, exhibiting widely in Italy and abroad. She has participated in the Venice Biennale (1964, 1986, and again in 2022) and in significant international exhibitions of kinetic and programmed art, from Bewogen Beweging at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1961) to Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet, currently on view at the Tate Gallery in London.

She was awarded the Presidente della Repubblica Prize by the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in 2007, and the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in 2018. In 2022, the Royal Palace of Milan (Palazzo Reale) honored her with a major retrospective: Grazia Varisco. Contemporary Pathways 1957–2022, which traced over six decades of inquiry and innovation. Her works are part of prestigious collections and institutions worldwide, including MoMA (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), GNAM (Rome), and Museo del Novecento (Milan). From 1984 to 2007, she held the chair in Theory of Perception at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

At BABS Art Gallery, Varisco now presents a series of never-before-seen artist’s jewels, exhibited in dialogue with key works from her broader oeuvre—such as Meridiana, Gnomoni, and Extrapagina—alongside select historical ornament models. These new pieces in gold and silver (earrings, necklaces, rings, brooches), crafted specifically for BABS in collaboration with master goldsmith Matteo Bonafede, are offered in numbered editions.

Often, the titles of her works serve as poetic entry points—“speaking titles,” as in A Nodo Mio (a wordplay between “In My Own Way” and “My Knot”): a gleaming mirror-polished silver pendant, formed from a single bold gesture that coils into an enveloping structure, declaring its unique creative and technical genesis. A Nodo Mio—also the title of the exhibition—is a distilled expression of Varisco’s artistic philosophy: a fascination with wordplay, double meanings, and multilingual puns (Demi-plié, Gnom-one-Two-Three), which mirror the sense of play and irony that privileges the immediacy of thought over the material value of carats.

While her engagement with ornament has been episodic, it has always yielded thought-provoking results—such as the jewelry she designed in the late 1980s using aluminum foils from lamp production.