Most museums in Italy started reopening this week as Coronavirus restrictions were loosened and, under the national colour-coded system, the country is currently yellow, which means more relaxed rules (even though it remains mandatory to wear masks, keeping your safety distance and frequently wash your hands).
Some places are reopening to visitors on appointment, among them there’s also a little known cultural space, the Pharaildis Van den Broeck Atelier in Milan (Via Marco Antonio Bragadino).
The fashion media dedicates a lot of space to the current collaboration between Belgian Raf Simons and Italian Miuccia Prada, but Pharaildis Van den Broeck was actually the first Belgian fashion designer who started working for Italian houses.
Born in Opwijk in 1952 Van den Broeck studied fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and then she moved to Milan where she started collaborating with Versace from 1978. In 1994, after working for Missoni and Trussardi, she decided to quit fashion and focused on another of her passions - painting.
She returned to Belgium in 1998 and worked in Bruxelles and Opwijk, but eventually moved back to Milan in 2008. She established her Atelier in Via Bragadino and painted until she died prematurely in 2004.
Van den Broeck produced in a relatively short time (2008-2014) over 2,000 paintings and sketches and her husband Michele Sagramoso, and curator Barbara Garatti, have spent around four years cataloguing her works and digitalizing them.
The archive dedicated to her promotes the artist's work and researches, also organising cultural activities to introduce to visitors other artists.
It would be interesting to discover (or rediscover) her further as Phara - as many of her friends, including Rosita Missoni, called her - tried to create a connection between Antwerp and Milan.
Van den Broeck carried out researches on traditional costumes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and developed a collection (her first one) entitled "Afrika", presented at the African Pavilion in Antwerp, documented in her archive by pictures, sketches and fabric samples.
But there is a lot to discover also in her paintings (that quite often included her signature symbol, an onion, an ordinary vegetable hinting at the many layered things that formed her interest) that weren't strictly about fashion and clothes, but touched upon different themes.
There are for example paintings inspired by her trip to China in 1996 when Pharaildis visited Suzhou and she got her picture taken dressed as a Chinese emperor (this picture inspired an entire series of paintings).
There are also pantings integrating consumer products such as boxes of pasta or perfume bottles that show some connections with Pop Art and works that incorporate collages dedicated to soccer that would probably manage to convince even the most fanatic football fans with no interest in art whatsoever, to start looking at paintings (one of these works features for example a diagram with the matches that led Italy to win the 2006 World Cup).
Pharaildis Van den Broeck also employed different techniques in her works experimenting with materials (incluiding newspaper strips).
Though perfect to allow us to rediscover her work, the digital medium doesn’t make justice to her works, so let's hope that, at some point, the materials from the archive will be lent to galleries for further exhibitions about her.
Image credits for this post
All images taken from the Atelier Pharaildis Van den Broeck site
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