KIKILIA

Susanna De Angelis Gardel is an Italian artist, born in Rome. She studied Language and Humanities in Milan, where she graduated in Modern Languages and Literature.
Since 1982 she has been living in Switzerland, in Lugano, where she began her painter career as a self-taught artist, in 2006.
She held her first solo exhibition in the art space of the former Banca della Svizzera Italiana, in Lugano, in 2012, entitled " Creatures ". This was followed by various exhibitions, both personal and collective, one of which at the Sotheby’s premises in Milan.
She opened her own studio in May 2015, in Lugano, where she presented her second pictorial cycle, " Creatures 2 ", the result of the study and work of the previous three years.
She enrolled and attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2016 and since 2017 she has been devoting herself mainly to sculpture.
In 2019 she presents her first major cycle dedicated to sculpture: " Karékla, una sedia per l’anima " (“ Karéla, a Seat for the Soul ”).

In her works, Susanna uses different materials such as bronze, steel and Belgian black marble. Her sculptures represent heads from which lots of chairs emerge, all messy and intertwined. What the artist wants to represent are the whirls of our thoughts that very often, even involuntarily, populate our unconscious, putting pressure on us. These are represented, "personified" by the chairs, which embody the idea of standing still, of stopping. In fact, everyone’s aspiration is to try to keep these thoughts at bay and sort them out.
According to the artist, the "full" chairs represent the thoughts still loaded with energy, while the empty ones are those whose energy has dissolved, the ones we somehow managed to tame or solve.
The faces of the sculptures appear as ancient finds, without expression, almost abstract, as the titles are all in Greek. All of this evokes the idea of a universal and timeless art.