Sarah Margnetti is a Swiss-born artist who lives in Brussels. Sarah Margnetti has created a visual language that combines optical illusions and abstract forms.
Margnetti’s work focuses on both the fragmentation of the human body and the optical illusion of materiality. The artist depicts fragments of bodies, mostly female bodies, whose functions are redirected, like an ear becoming a body or a body becoming a brain. Margnetti’s arts aim to unsettle notions of gender, sexuality, and domesticity.
Her figures flow through surfaces and change shape, showing themselves in fragments of architectural materials in the trompe l’oeil’ technique. Margnetti creates murals, textiles, furniture, and architectural interventions that display a variety of technical modes while blurring the line between interiority and exteriority.
Tuning Up (2022) depicts a woman’s nails, which transform into a woven rattan or bamboo wall. It reminds me how the domestic work of women is frequently reduced to unseen work. Even if women work in the public sphere, they are seen only as a small part of capitalism’s production. In fact, just like these nails, they are strong, supporting the whole structure of the wall.
Margnetti’s subjects are flexible and free because they are not depicted as complete faces or figures. They are unidentifiable and unknowable. It is just like women and their unseen works that support society’s structure. Her work’s emptiness also evokes the distance and imperceptibility of female labor.
Margnetti is inspired by the link between the body and architecture, especially in the figure of the caryatid. The caryatid, or “maidens of Karyai,” was an ancient Greek sculptured female figure that was frequently draped in a long tunic and supported an entablature on her head. The caryatid frequently replaced a column or pillar in a building.
Sarah Margnetti questions the historical connection between female bodies and architecture by adopting this figure. She employs the caryatid to give visual form to the topic of the unseen work done by women to maintain the strength of the world’s economic and social structure.
Margnetti’s works, along with over 100 other artists’ works, is on view at the Liste Art Fair Basel, Switzerland, from June 12–18, 2023.
Sarah Margnetti has a Master’s in Visual Arts from the HES-SO, Work, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual Arts from the École cantonale d’art of Lausanne/ECAL (2005-2009).Master’s degree from HEAD (2013–2015) at Geneva University of Art and Design At one of the earliest institutions to focus on the study of ornamental painting, the Institut Van der Kelen-Logelain in Brussels, she also finished a practical training program.