Maurizio Anzeri (b. 1969)

Maurizio Anzeri makes his portraits by sewing directly into found vintage photographs. His embroidered patterns embellish his subjects like elaborate masks or costumes, but also suggest a psychological aura, as if revealing thoughts, feelings or interior states. The soft, antique sepia of the photographs is often at odds with the graphic lines and silky shimmer of the thread. Combined, these media create the effect of a dimension where history and future converge. The faces of Yvonne and Edith (lot 30) are both veiled by taut vortexes of green and white filament. Playing on the girls’ underlying features, these adornments are almost Cubist in effect, recalling the multifaceted portraits of Picasso or even the latter-day warped visages of George Condo; unlike such paintings, however, Anzeri’s sewn photographs gain an uncanny, almost supernatural strangeness, as if materially revealing some spirit latent in what the camera has captured. Recently included in the Saatchi show ‘Iconoclasts: Art Out of the Mainstream’, these works reanimate the past into a vivid and haunting presence. ‘I work with sewing, embroidery and drawing to explore the essence of signs in their physical manifestation’, says the artist. ‘I take inspiration from my own personal experience and observation of how, in other cultures, bodies themselves are treated as living graphic symbols.’