Marisa Tesauro
Turin
Tesauro's work addresses how industrial materials and structures are built and how they corrode, revealing the transition between becoming and crumbling.
Message
Marisa Tesauro lives and works in Turin, Italy. Her sculptures, installations and works on paper address how industrial materials and structures are built and how they corrode. Working with forms and structures taken from packaging materials, derelict spaces and architectural debris, she gives profound significance to overlooked fragments that narrate our contemporary histories. She shifts them from the temporary and disposable to something preserved, seen, and remembered.
Tesauro's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including La Specola museum, Florence, Queens Museum of Art, New York, Eyebeam Gallery, New York, La Escocesa, Barcelona, Stand4 Gallery, New York, Martina Simeti, Milan, Project:ARTspace, New York, Andrew Edlin Gallery and the Bronx Museum of Art, New York.
Tesauro's site-specific installations include Hunter's Point South, New York, Monasterace Superiore, Italy, Old American Can Factory, New York, Bay Ridge Saw, New York and No Longer Empty at the Andrew Freedman Home. She has published two artist books, Strutture with Content Series and Relics in the Construction of Place. She collaborates with archeologists working in the Magna Grecia area of Italy and gives lectures on her work within the archeology field.
She is the recipient of an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Emergency Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and the Yvonne Force Award amongst others.
She was formerly an artist in the Artist Pension Trust and was an artist in residence at the Queens Museum Studio in the Park, Bronx Museum of Arts: Artists in the Marketplace and received a full-fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Tesauro received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001.
Statement
My work examines industrial structures and materials: packaging, construction debris and architectural ruins. I focus on how they are built and how they corrode, exploring the transition between becoming and crumbling. Drawing from my work with archeologists, theatrical set design, and studies of the Capriccio tradition, I approach overlooked materials and spaces as silent narrators of our contemporary history.
Packing materials are central to my practice: transient forms with architectonic qualities, designed solely to protect what we deem valuable. They mark time through physical transformation like natural materials shaped by weather: wearing, fading, shifting. Yet as industrial remnants, they carry traces of human activity and construction.
In my sculptural work, I carefully craft and place fragile elements in unstable arrangements that appear to be holding themselves together just long enough to be seen. The pedestals and supports are precariously built and integrated into the work itself, further evoking a sense of imminent collapse held in suspension. This is a direct reflection on the urban spaces in which we live: sites of construction and decay, ambition and neglect, endurance and erosion.
I shift to a more intimate scale in works on paper, depicting mundane scenes: a piece of styrofoam deteriorating on the sidewalk, scaffolding covers, a scrap of bubble wrap. I treat the seemingly insignificant as protagonists, witnesses to our building and consuming: materials whose very existence depends on our needs.
Working with these everyday forms and materials, they become vessels of memory and presence. My place in a culture that reveres the preservation of statues, ceramics and ancient stones has profoundly shaped my sensitivity to how materials carry history. I want to hold on to these overlooked fragments that reveal our histories, shifting them from the temporary and disposable to something preserved, seen, and remembered.