Luisa Rabbia: Containing the Container

Tanya Leighton is delighted to present ›Containing the Container‹ the first solo exhibition in Germany by New York based artist Luisa Rabbia, whose work has been the subject of major exhibitions at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; Fondazione Merz, Turin; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; and PROA Foundation, Buenos Aires.

Luisa Rabbia is one of the most quietly significant figurative artists to have emerged from Italy in the last thirty years. Her work connects personal experience with larger historical and political events, often taking books and current affairs as starting points. 

For ›Containing the Container‹, Rabbia looks at the female body as a source of energy and change, and at the networks of support women have built over generations. The works draw on Neolithic mythology, where the female body was viewed as a primary ›transformer‹—a sacred vessel with the capacity to turn life, death, and energy into new existence. In Rabbia’s ›Transformers‹, figures made up of many bodies show how a community can turn hardship into strength.

Her paintings blur the line between the human body and the natural world. Working on large canvases, she builds up layered compositions in which figures appear and disappear, shifting between very small (cells) and the very large (the cosmos). The surfaces show how physically she works: paint scraped in repeated gestures, marks built up over time, fingerprints pressed into pigments. These small traces are like the impressions a life leaves behind, while the paintings themselves open out into something much larger. Her use of colour suggests movement and change: states of becoming, both physical and spiritual. 

Rabbia’s figures hold real emotional depth. They give form to resilience and renewal, experiences that are personal and shared at once.