The Krefeld-based artist Patrizia Casagranda creates expressive symbioses with elements of collage, painting, stencil technique, street art and typography. Her motifs are mostly arranged as thematically homogeneous series of images in which the artist follows a particular subject or aspect of materiality.

In a time of increasing digitalization, which does not stop at art, Casagranda consciously focuses on a tangibly tangible materiality in her works. On sheets of plywood, recycled army tents, or truck tarps, she creates relief-like, jagged surfaces of waves, furrows, mortar, and burls.

Casagranda works with the collage principle as well as with its opposite, the exfoliation of decollage: she flames off the top layer of corrugated cardboard to expose the wave profile. She covers fabric over paper, applies writing in graffiti style. An important role is played by the dotted grid applied from a mortar-plaster mixture and later covered with paint.

These dots are reminiscent of works by Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke. However, they stand out three-dimensionally in Casagranda's work. Her compositions carry up to 15 layers and possess a fascinating sense of depth. Up close, the work appears as little more than an abstract relief.

But if you take just a few steps back, the individual fragments suddenly come together and an expressive portrait of a woman manifests itself out of the sea of dots. On the one hand, Casagranda likes to work with familiar faces of our media world - models, activists, or actresses, as in the painting "White Belief II," which shows the U.S. actress Jennifer Lawrence, an emancipated strong woman with a role model function.

But unknown persons from Casagranda's immediate personal environment also appear as motifs, as do young, for us nameless, Indian women of the Kalbelia caste, who live in the slums of New Delhi by picking up garbage. The artist had befriended these girls during one of her annual visits to India and was deeply impressed by their unbroken optimism and zest for life, which gave her the inspiration for the "Belief" series. Whether a public face or an unknown private person, it is the warmth of their universal feminine radiance that Casagranda uses to emphasize the unifying and shared values of love and peace in the world religions of Buddhism, Shinto, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and - in the case of "White Belief II" - Christianity.

Thus, all the paintings in the series deliberately bear the word "Belief" in the title, with only their coloration and texture changing in detail. Transferred to the question of faith, each picture carries the humanistic message that personal faith can take on many faces, expressions and shades, the language of charity and peace always remains the same.

The German-Italian artist Patrizia Casagranda (*1979, Krefeld, Germany) first graduated in 2002 with honors in design at the FH Niederrhein and attended the painting academies in Nice, Ravensburg and Trier. After changing jobs as a graphic designer (for Günther Uecker and Markus Lüpertz, among others), she has been working freelance since 2015, in phases in Germany, the Netherlands and India. Thanks to her distinctive style, she has already experienced considerable success on the part of the international art scene after a short time.

Nominations/Prizes

Art Award Germany 2021
West Germany Prestige Award 2020/2021
ADCfineart Art comes alive Cincinatti 2020
Musaartspace (Selected by the unesco) 2020
Art Foundation Berlin 2020
Artprize Rome 2020
Artprize Barcelona (Artboxgallery) 2020
Southwest German Art Award 2020
Artprize Zurich (Artboxgallery) 2019
Artprize Wörth 2018
Artprize Worms 2018