Elisa Montessori. Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber [Il sogno della camera rossa], the title of the solo exhibition by the artist Elisa Montessori (Genoa, 1931;lives and works in Rome) curated by Alessandra Mammì with Andrea Viliani, stages a coherent but surprising dialogue with items from the Asian Arts and Cultures Collections displayed as part of the EUR_Asia Project, specifically, a selection of pieces rarely ever shown in the Chinese collections conserved at the Luigi Pigorini Prehistoric Ethnographic Museum. The show takes its name from a classic of Chinese literature, the allegorical novel that Cao Xueqin published in 1792, an encyclopedic work providing extraordinary testimony and meticulous description of the life, art, customs, rituals, tastes, and feelings of the Chinese aristocracy of the time. The artist Montessori applies all of this in developing an intimate poetic dialogue with the aesthetic, literature, art and culture of China that have always been an essential part of her research.

The exhibition originated—thanks to a call by the 2024 PAC Plan for Contemporary Art) promoted and supported by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture—from the acquisition of a seminal painting by Montessori, Paesaggio della Manciuria presented at the 40th Venice International Art Biennale in 1982, the year it was done.