Isolde Frepoli

Is it the way that she works with clay or is it the result that attracts the viewer and persuades us to look closer? Isolde Frepoli works with an old material and an old topos, one ften viewed as outdated: the portrait, the head, the bust, usually of women, and in doing so creates new visual solutions. Her coloured works are not painted; in the final stage of her process she uses engobe,coloured clay. These individualised figures appear both incredibly alive and at the same time seem lost in reverie, distanced, untouchable.
Frepoli creates images that show the dignity of human beings. This becomes even more evident when the artist looks beyond familiar Western cultural norms and literally personifies non-European cultures: the surface treatment of the clay characterising these in meticulous detail.