‘Pray For Me’ Cycle, 2013-2015

5 works from the series Rue Du Commerce,

each circa 90×180 cm

Property of the artist

For the Rosengarten in Cadore 2018, I will present a series of five free-hanging paintings on un-stretched canvas painted between 2013 and 2015 in Italy and Ivory Coast, entitled Rue du Commerce and subtitled ‘Pray for Me’.

Based on the ‘pagne religieux’ fabrics celebrating the Madonna, Christian feast days, particular religious cosmologies and traditional patterning evidenced in the wax-cloth, here all joins together as a painted patchwork, re-defined in the form of the shift form of female dress, surrounded by the simply painted contour maps of Italy and the African continent – a meeting of worlds – with the occasional red rose interspaced.

By hanging the works freely in the First World War barracks in Cibiana Cadore, above spaces where once soldiers may have slept and dreamt of sweethearts and mothers, the 100 years separating us from those men are eluded to by the hovering female dresses and the prayers perhaps recited on those long, cold nights. Here the ‘interstitial space’ is reimagined in the negative space between the hung canvases, and the space between traditional female ways of decoration, faith and the violence of these young men’s live at that particular historical moment.

Virginia Ryan is an Australian-Italian bi-national artist working in Italy and in West Africa. Ryan graduated in 1979 from the National Art School, Canberra, Australia and in 1994 from the Post-graduate School of Art Therapy in Edinburgh, Scotland. Now based primarily in Italy and Ivory Coast, she has lived and worked with artists in Alexandria, Egypt (1982 ~1985), Curitiba, Brazil (1988~1990), Belgrade, Serbia (1990~1992), Edinburgh, Scotland (1992~1995) and Accra, Ghana (2001~2007). Adjunct to her art practice, Ryan co-founded the Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA), Ghana, in 2004. Ryan’s work has often concerned displacement, migrations, memory, loss and transformation, and has involved multiple engagements with local artists, communities and intersecting art worlds in the places where she has resided. She uses traditional western and contemporary visual language and techniques, often employing everyday objects to explore the extraordinary reality of today’s dynamic West Africa and Italy. While mindful of her origins, her mixed media artwork iterates how her experience living in many countries has allowed her to step outside the claustrophobia of the Eurocentric gaze. Since 2008, she has exhibited in the biennales of Malindi, Dakar and Venice and is represented by the gallery Montoro12 in Rome.