Art contest - Manuela Caniato

Artwork title : Threadbare Beauty

Cm 32x32. Gilded square frame.

Digital print on two layers, cotton and organza. Embroidery embellished with beads, sequins, metal thread, acrylic paint, organza.

Once, during a visit to Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, I wandered into the Gallery of Beauties – thirty-eight portraits of the women King Ludwig II considered the most exquisite of his time. Standing among those long-gone faces, I found myself contemplating the idealisation of beauty. At home, in front of the mirror, I studied the lines that time had etched into my own face. I looked at my hands, growing bonier by the day, my sunken eyes... I recalled the women in the gallery: captured at their most radiant moment, immortalised in paint. Figures of a divine perfection that would never fade. What did the women in Ludwig’s palace – growing older just like me – think of their perfect counterparts in Ludwig’s gallery? How did they feel as the gap between themselves and their portrait widened with the years?

So, to liberate them from this plight I took up the needle. I used embroidery to break into those ghostly portraits, leaving my mark on them. I stitched in my own language, making them age. Because even in decline, there’s a certain beauty – it’s part of being human. Stitch by stitch, I made them mortal again.

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