Melancholia Painting

Anna Madia, graduated in Painting at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts of Turin, Italy. She lives and works in France. In 2011, she’s among the artists selected by Vittorio Sgarbi for the Italian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennial (Piedmont Region). In 2010 she won a triennialy workshop at the Ginkgo Contemporary Art Centre in Troyes (France) and in 2009 she became «tutor in painting» at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts of Turin. Artistically active in France, Italy and abroad, she has been selected as finalist at the Italian Factory Prize in 2004, at the Cairo Award in 2006, at the British Portrait Award of the National Portrait Gallery of London in 2007; she has won in 2008 the Renaissance Prize of the Italian Cultural Institut of London and La Fenice Prize of Venice. 2014: Bursary "Aide a la creation", Champagne Ardenne Region. France. 2014 Finalist top ten Showdown Saatchi Art "Body Electric". "One to watch" interview Saatchi Art. "Invest in Art" Spring catalog 2016 Saatchi Art The vocation for the self-portrait, literature and theater have nourished for years my painting. Ophelia, Alice in wonderland, The girl without hands, are some of the characters that I have chosen to pay homage through my artistic work. Currently, sleep and coma are key elements of the new series titled Sleepwalking. Once a year in my family there was the ritual of washing the wool of the mattresses: every corner of the house was filled with soft cream-colored substance and I spent hours and hours playing and imagine snow-capped peaks and bizarre appearances. Today this tradition is for me a rite of love and liberation from the symbolic stigmata of sleepless nights, nightmares and infirmity: the bed once again becomes the crib in which a new cycle starts. Wool, doilies and hair are the gateway to this world suspended between reality and dream. Searching on sleepwalking and other disorders (narcolepsy, hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations…), I started to investigate another kind of portrait: hidden faces, eyes cleared, enigmatic situations in which flashes and personal hallucinations appear.