Italian artist Elisa Sighicelli presents her second solo exhibition at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong: Petits Rats, on view from 20 May through 8 July 2023.
In this interview, Sighicelli talks briefly about her career, her practice, and the new set of works presented at Rossi & Rossi.
The exhibition's title is derived from the nineteenth-century French term les petits rats, which was used to describe young ballerinas-in-training at the Paris Opera. The world and the moving bodies of the dancers inspired many of Edgar Degas’s works, including his iconic bronze sculptures of dancers, seventy-three of which were recently on view in the 2020 exhibition Degas from the permanent collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Sighicelli photographed this assemblage in MASP’s storeroom when the works were in their post-cataloguing state, labels draping alongside their limbs and torsos. With a single source of lighting, these photographs infuse Degas’s works with movement. Deviating from Sighicelli’s past exploration of the materiality of images, this project focusses on the making of image and narrative.
