There are artists who can turn into an inspiration for both fashion and jewellery designers.
Regina Cassolo Bracchi, better known simply as Regina (her name means "queen" in English), one the least known artists of the 20th century, is a perfect example.
This year the artist will be rediscovered thanks to the first major retrospective dedicated to her at Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC) in Bergamo.
Inspired by the purchase of a major set of Regina's works by GAMeC and the Centre Pompidou of Paris, "Regina. Della scultura" (Queen. Of Sculpture) will be open from April (date to be confirmed as GAMeC is waiting for updated Covid-19 guidelines issued by the Italian government) to 29th August and will bring together two hundred and fifty works from a fifty-year artistic career.
This year Regina will also be honoured at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the collective exhibition "Women in Abstraction: Another History of Abstraction in the 20th Century" (May 5 – September 6) curated by Christine Macel and Karolina Lewandowska.
Born in 1894 in Mede Lomellina, near Pavia, Italy, Regina was the daughter of a butcher and was orphaned at a young age. She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and then in Turin with the sculptor Giovanni Battista Alloati.
She started producing artworks in the '20s with realist portraits and sculptures that conformed to the fashion of the time, even though some of her heads showed different inspirations, pointing at African sculptures and artifacts.
In the '30s, moving away from her personal academic and naturalistic research, Regina focused on experimental materials, making pieces with aluminum, iron wire, sandpaper, tin and tinplate, evoking mechanical worlds à la Fortunato Depero.
Her folded aluminum shapes liberated forms from the restrictions of volumes of traditional sculpture and some of her pieces also showed connections with the spatial studies of avant-garde sculptor Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko and Lucio Fontana.
In 1934 Regina undersigned the Manifesto Tecnico dell'Aeroplastica Futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Aerosculpture) and took part in events about aeropainting.
In 1951 Regina approached the "Movimento Arte Concreta" (MAC; Concrete Art Movement) through Bruno Munari and she adopted a geometrical aesthetics using circles, ellipses and the interplay of triangles or lozenges pieced together with grace and balance in vibrant mobile compositions, while still experimenting with modern materials such as Plexiglas that allowed her to suspend multi-coloured sculptures inside this transparent material.
In the '50s Regina, who also created works inspired by new scientific and space discoveries and who summed up the mirage of the race to the moon in her works exploring the void, was invited to take part in the Bienal de São Paulo, the first Concrete Art exhibition and the Milan Biennial.
She continued her experiments in abstract art in the '60s, developing also an interest in themes borrowed from nature and the landscape.
Curated by Chiara Gatti and Lorenzo Giusti, the event in Bergamo will feature complex, experimental, poetic and versatile pieces, including sculptures, mobiles, drawings, paper models and notebooks on loan from the Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection and Archive, other private collections and the Museum of Mede Lomellina.
All these pieces will form a journey through Regina's lightness of materials and dynamism of forms, and through her language based on geometric synthesis and lyrical abstractions.
There are different artworks by Regina Cassolo Bracchi that may prove inspiring for fashion designers: as usual drawings, sketches like the ones representing the wild vegetation or the natural world, could be employed as the starting point for prints and patterns.
But her mechanical pieces in tin and aluminum could be used for a variety of experiments: they could indeed be employed as inspirations for jewellery pieces, but also for fashion.
If you disassembled the sculptures made with aluminum sheets and reduced them to flat pieces you'd realise that Bracchi worked like a tailor.
Once disassembled, Regina's dynamic aerosculptures, made of layers of tin, aluminum, metal or celluloid sheets, or her bas reliefs such as "L’amante dell’aviatore" (The Pilot's Lover, 1935), lose their three-dimensional quality and become pieces of flat materials.
When analysed in that format these pieces resemble a tailor's pattern cutting, as proved by the preliminary studies Regina made with paper (she also made some variants in aluminum) that will also be part of the exhibition in Bergamo.
Held together with pins, in keeping with a sartorial practice applied to the aerial vocation of her figures, these patterns were used by the artist to shape metal without uncertainty, with both energy and softness.
Regina died in 1974 and her husband, the painter Luigi Bracchi, donated her works to the city of Mede Lomellina, yet they remained largely unknown. Now the time has come to rediscover her as she has got more stories to tell us, especially about materials and sculpting like a tailor.
Image credits for this post
Regina, Aerosensibilità (Aerosensibility, 1935)
Aluminum
Comune di Mede – "Regina" Collection
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, L'amante dell’aviatore (The Pilot's Lover, 1935)
Aluminum
Comune di Mede – "Regina" Collection
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Danzatrice (Dancer, 1930)
Aluminum
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Maschera (La donna e il fiore) (Mask, The Woman and the Flower, 1930)
Aluminum
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Piccola italiana (The Little Italian, 1930-35)
Aluminum
Comune di Mede – "Regina" Collection
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Fiore (Flower, 1946)
Plaster
Comune di Mede – "Regina" Collection
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Scultura concreta a tre piramidi (Concrete sculpture with three pyramids, 1950)
Concrete
Comune di Mede – "Regina" Collection
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Composizione concreta 1 (Concrete composition 1, 1955)
Coloured velvet paper collage
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Composizione concreta 2 (Concrete composition 2, 1955)
Coloured velvet paper collage
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta e Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Suono delle campane (serie) (The sound of the bells (series), 1963)
Mixed technique on paper
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Omaggio a Charles P. Conrad e Alan Bean (Homage to Charles P. Conrad and Alan Bean, 1970)
Multi-coloured Plexiglas and drawings on paper
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Scultura multicolore cerchi e fili (Sculpture with multi-coloured circles and threads, 1968)
Multi-coloured Plexiglas, coloured tape and nylon threads
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Struttura (Structure, 1950)
Multi-coloured Plexiglas
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Struttura (Structure, 1953)
Iron
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Struttura (Structure. 1955)
Iron wire and metal net
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Model for mobile sculpture, 1960s
Paper and pins
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Paper project for Aerosensibility, 1935
Paper cuttings
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Struttura (Structure, 1962-65)
Multi-coloured Plexiglas
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Studio per scultura (Study for a sculpture, 1967)
Pastel on paper
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Notebook sketch, undated
Ink on paper
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
Regina, Portrait of the artist in a notebook, undated
Ink on paper
Gaetano and Zoe Fermani Collection-Archive
Photo by: Alessandro Saletta and Piercarlo Quecchia – DSL Studio
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