
Portrait by Audrey Derell, Santa Fe
BIO. Sandra Filippucci
Contemporary figurative artist Sandra Filippucci has recently returned to Connecticut from Santa Fe. Attended the Maryland Institute of Art on scholarship, and studied painting, drawing and printmaking. Filippucci then became part of a group of New York artists working with technology since the mid-eighties, and was the first artist to have a solo digital & video exhibition at The Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan. For decades, her primary subject has been Joan of Arc.
While known for her Joan of Arc work in both traditional media and 3d imaging, new work emerged from the quiet isolation of 2020-21. “The Sisters of the Cloth Series” is built upon the impressions of a five year old in La Rochelle, France, where – for a time – Filippucci was put into the custody of nuns who lived in a medieval convent. These 3d ceramic studies will be translated by a state-of-the-art WASP 3d clay printer, then fired and glazed into larger than life-size sculptures combining the qualities of gloss, bisque and Raku. Ann Landi, writer for Art News and the Wall Street Journal, sees this ceramic work as “…a deeply felt contemporary reflection on an archaic institution that reveals both beauty and entrapment.”
Comfortable with technology, the artist was drawn to make this new work in ceramic using a clay 3d printer. “Ceramic suggests fragility. These iterations of fresh novitiates, postulants and obedient nuns in deep drapery no longer exist in the real world. The habits they wore have virtually disappeared. These are the fragile impressions of shapes – sometimes apparitions – from a five-year old mind. I have harbored these windswept impressions over a lifetime and, like the statuary that filled their Medieval convent, these pieces are a kind of vesper, a chant from the sanctuary of dreams.”
CURRENT WORK: UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES
Recent Mozaik Art LA Award winner, Sandra Filippucci, has lectured and had exhibitions and solos at the Museum of American Illustration, Colgate University, Syracuse University, The Morrison Gallery, The Maryland Institute, the Verbum Digital Gallery and in Santa Fe: Evoke Gallery, Center of Contemporary Arts, Linda Durham Gallery, Turner Carroll, and the Owings Dewey Gallery. The artist has contributed work to numerous charities including The Kent School, Women Against Violence, Artists Medical Fund and Habitat for Humanity. Her work is in many private, public, and corporate collections.