In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition “Le strutture non tremano”, the project Trésor-en-valise* returns to Milan.

The protagonist of this edition is Nora Arrieta, the German sculptor and ceramist represented by the Florentine Galleria Antonella Villanova (site of the contemporaneous two-person exhibition “Nora Arrieta / Keiyona C. Stumpf”).

The exhibition, staged with furnishings designed by Giovanni Michelucci in 1957 for the main headquarters of the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze bank from the Galleria Luisa delle Piane collection, presents a group of precious small works in porcelain, and a selection of medium-sized ceramic pieces that express Arrieta’s sarcastic, perspicacious poetics. Her works contextually explore both the tangible, real world and the chimeric, virtual dimension of imagination and fantasy.

In Nora Arrieta’s work, an irreverent iconographic language and a masterful use of color engender an honest, spirited dialogue with the materials, which she listens to and tames via manipulation, transformation and mimesis, giving shape and voice to social themes and personal infatuations through, and beyond, form.

Her sculptures are a sort of vocabulary of known, sometimes intentionally ordinary objects and images depicted in such a way as to cartoonify their formal language and make it hypertrophic.  

Furthering enhancing the hypnotic, inclusive nature of Nora’s work is the subtly irreverent, pure, almost childlike humoristic-metaphorical manner with which she presents her iconographies and assembles her works, drawing the viewer into a playful experience of solving or inventing a riddle that reveals ambiguous connections between their figurative forms and their layers. Like a construction game, Nora’s works pull viewers into an anarchic form of play, letting them freely interpret the symbolic value of objects and images, invent worlds, and perceive reality from their own individual point of view.

Unexpected, destabilizing juxtapositions convey the disorderly crowding and overlapping of information in the digital age, and on a more strictly personal level, are also a map of Nora’s view of the world and its history. Hers is a darting, transversal gaze that probes different, apparently incompatible contexts with the same curiosity: high culture and pop culture, public sphere and private sphere, the religious context and worldly affairs, her Peruvian and German roots and American culture, the evolution of artistic languages and representation from the Medieval to the Baroque, from Mannerism to Pop Art, to the fictitious esthetic of social media.

In the case of the small porcelain works in particular, which Nora calls precious little toys, her inspiration came from different contexts. On one hand, her own childhood memories, especially the series of “Polly Pocket” toys, fanciful little miniature cases that contained little worlds within them. On the other hand, her experience in the United States, where she spent several years living and studying, which was the source of several influences: her affinity with the Funk Ceramics artistic movement that developed in the 1960s in California and was marked by an experimental, highly sculptural approach to ceramics and a use of vivid colors; her encounters with the archeological past at the New York Museum of Natural History (memories that emerge in a dinosaur motif); and finally, the seduction of American pop imagery surrounding the rituals and esthetic of street food.

Another reference for these little porcelain works was the treasury of Dresden, and the magnificent collection in its “Green Vault” (Grünes Gewölbe) a sort of Cabinet de Curiosités that hold precious masterpieces of jewelry-making, Baroque art and rare curious objects. It is an emblem of the precious quality of hand-crafted and artistic works, a hymn to the idea of wonder and treasure.

“Porcelain puts me in a completely different mental and physical working condition than ceramics – when I’m working on a large-size ceramic sculpture, I realize that I move differently around my studio and I’m always standing up, while when I work with porcelain, I’m sitting at a table and I have the sculpture there in front of me, sort of like when I work on a drawing.”

(From the conversation between Nora Arrieta and Emanuela Nobile Mino, in “Nora Arrieta”, Ed. Galleria Antonella Villanova, Florence 2025)

NORA ARRIETA
Nora Arrieta was born in Leipzig in 1989, and now lives and works in Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany, where she is also an instructor and head of the studio-laboratory of the ceramics department at the Institute for Ceramic and Glass Arts; she is also in charge of firing at the last historic Kannofen kiln in the Westerwald region. She studied sculpture at the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art and the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, and earned a Masters in ceramics at Alfred University in New York State. She received a teaching fellowship to Tabor Academy in Marion, MA, and has had artistic residencies at MOkS in Estonia and at Syracuse University. Arrieta’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, at the Pulverturm Stadtmuseum in Oldenburg, the Keramikmuseum Westerwald in Höhr-Grenzhausen, the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop, the Galerie Handwerk in Munich, the Keramion Foundation in Frechen, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, Site Brooklyn Gallery in New York and Eigen Art Lab in Berlin. Nora Arrieta’s work has earned numerous awards, including the second place at the Westerwald Prize in 2024, the "Keramik im Pulverturm" prize from the Stadtmuseum in Oldenburg, the Grassi-Sparkassenpreis, the Frechener Keramikpreis and the Mart Stam Award. Her works are in several public collections, including those of the Grassimuseum in Leipzig, the Fama Kunststiftung, the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, and the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, as well as various private collections.

*Trésor-en-valise is an itinerant exhibition format curated by Emanuela Nobile Mino that consists of periodic events dedicated to experimentation in contemporary art, design and jewelry, involving Italian and international galleries within a framework of mutual cooperation and hospitality, offering a vehicle for small groups of work to move from city to city and be shown in ever-changing contexts to a broad audience.