Biography
MIRIAM SIRAGUSA was born in Soleure (Switzerland) in 1976. In 1995 she enrolled on a painting course at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. During this course she also had the opportunity to attend a course at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Nantes (France). She graduated in 2000 with a thesis on Expressionist colours, namely the Swiss formulation. She collaborated with the La Loggia art gallery in Carona (Switzerland) from 2004 to 2010, as art curator. She has been teaching Visual Arts at the Liceo Cantonale di Lugano 1(High School) for eleven years. Several stays in Berlin in the past few years have given her the opportunity to get in touch with the Tacheles Cultural Centre and she was offered an atelier there. During her various stays in Germany, she got acquainted with the German capital’s underground art. Motherhood changed the course of her destiny and, instead of the Tacheles option, she chose to continue her activity at her atelier, now located in Soragno (Switzerland).
The underground spirit still have an influence on her artistic output; in the same way as travelling – both on a physical and emotional level – continues to inspire her work. Apart from these elements, her work has been influenced by her search for the feminine archetype, from a wild female perspective to Mother Earth. In her latest works the artist has used different techniques and painted mainly on carton board, on fruit and vegetable packaging, in envelopes, Ram boxes, photocopies, wood. From canvas to frame, raw material accompanies the artist on her journey. It is a physical journey, an emotional journey (from passion-rage-aggressiveness to the joys of motherhood), a spiritual journey in a “here and now” dimension, living the present to the full, abhorring existential fixity and worn mental-social patterns. The artist captures the “here and now” elements with the help of a digital camera (a “handbag digital camera” as she likes to call it). In fact, her images have a strong photographic imprint, so much so that sometimes her brush strokes are based on the photograph as such.
