PAINTING
SILVIA BIGNAMI
 
DETAILS
Oil on canvas
50 x 50 cm
2025
 
DESCRIPTION
This painting imagines Mozart at around thirteen or fourteen years old, returning to Salzburg after his travels across Europe and about to depart for my own city, Bologna, where he would take his exam at the conservatory under Padre Martini and begin his “adult” career. I know Mozart’s music intimately and have read his entire collection of letters, from adolescence to the end of his life. In this portrait, I tried to capture the restlessness he felt toward the confined atmosphere of Salzburg, and the longing for freedom he sought to express through music. For his features, I followed the description given by the Irish tenor and composer Michael Kelly, a friend of Mozart and the author of Reminiscences (1826): blond hair the color of wheat, large blue thoughtful eyes, a small but full mouth, and an aquiline nose. Yet more than his physical traits, I aimed to convey his state of mind,standing on the threshold of a difficult transition, bidding farewell to the life of a child prodigy and stepping into the far more perilous journey of adulthood.
 
BIOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST
Silvia Bignami (b. Bologna, Italy, 1978) is a painter and former journalist for La Repubblica. Beginning her painting practice in 2022 after a life drawing course at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, she works primarily in oil, merging classical techniques (grisaille, glazing, chiaroscuro) with disruptive interventions like scratches and sandpaper.
Her figurative works explore transforming identities,fluid, fragmented forms balancing beauty and decay, strength and vulnerability. Informed by journalism, her art resists sanitized realities, unveiling contradictions in gendered and digital selves. Current series: GLITCH, with surreal, gothic distortions.
 
Selected exhibitions: solo Corpi in guardia (Galleria Wikiarte, Bologna, 2025); group shows including Gender Fluidity (2024) and Tratti di umanità (2025); art fairs (Art3f Milano/Paris, Bergamo, 2025). Submissions to awards: Premio Modigliani, Cairo Prize, Almenara Art Prize, BBA Prize (2025).