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FILIPPUCCI UPCOMING EXHIBITION: Ukraine Flower Series - The Power of Defiance 2023
February 27, 2023

ART REVIEW of Ukraine Series

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Fractured gardens: Filippucci’s response to war in Ukraine highlighted at Five Points

by Tracey O’Shaughnessy, Republican-American Newspaper
February 23, 2023

The flower stems in Sandra Filippucci’s mixed media works are dark. So pitch, they are nearly invisible. They move upward with a crumbly impotence toward a blood-red background. Wherever these flowers are blooming is an obscure, agitated space, filled with violent lashing blacks and dribbles of sooty gray.The blossoms themselves seem synthetic and unraveled, like shiny, shredded strands of mylar balloons. The feelings they evoke – joy flogged with fear, innocence shattered into disintegration, are of a garden despoiled.

Filippucci’s searing “Ukraine Flower Series: The Power of Defiance,” now at Five Points Gallery, is the artist’s response to the war in Ukraine.

Many titles – Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv – reference specific sites or events. Occasionally, Filippucci will annotate them, in graphite cursive citations of dates and devastation. Yet, most of the works speak for themselves, flower-like shapes of Ukraine’s pulverized garden. The works look like paintings, large, broad expanses of paint. Flower petals take the form of the cornette of a nun’s wimple, or the mashed remains of a vibrantly colored balloon. These motifs are often crushed together and mangled, picking up pieces of material like a tossed wad of gum. Here is a tube. There is a ribbon of netting. Over there are dagger-like shards of glass. All of them fuse into gobs of the flora and fuselage, a nasty but captivating clump of the natural and the martial.

War Babies, (Ukraine Flower Series), January 2023. Mixed media on custom wood panel, 42 x 60 in

War Babies, (Ukraine Flower Series), Jan 2023. Mixed media on custom wood panel, 42 x 60

In “War Babies,” Filippucci’s most colorful indictment of the war, a flower blooms with improbable vividness against an inky black background. The petals seem ripped apart or badly glued back together. In the bottom right, an unmistakable image of a fetus, ensconced in a putty gray orb, hangs from the petal through a single pink thread. Above, what should be a sunflower yellow petal bursts into swirling flames that dash malevolently across the canvas.

This is one of the rare color images in work that is largely monotone. Most of the works feature the oddly immaculate ivory of a wedding or first communion dress. But the buds tear, fold outward or curve, like grace being violated.

In “Mariupol Maternity Hospital: Angel Wings,” a reference to Russia’s March 9, 2022, attack on the maternity hospital in Mariupol, strips of white sheets ooze with drips of black that drizzle toward the ochre field below.Filippucci’s brush strokes alternately flog and drizzle, effectively conveying power and anguish.

FILIPPUCCI - Mariupol Maternity Hospital: Angel Wings. Mixed media on rag paper, 40 x 60 in

Mariupol Maternity Hospital: Angel Wings. Mixed media on rag paper, 40 x 60 in

Unsurprisingly, for Filippucci, who has spent 30 years focusing on the singular figure of Joan of Arc, these works are largely monochromatic.

This is the garden of good and evil, a dynamic as fierce as Joseph’s wrestling match with the angel.

The works are filled with religious imagery, including, in one case, a coiled black snake that could be mistaken for plastic tubing. Like her brush strokes, which can be broad and ferocious or delicate and tender, Filippucci pits the heavenly with the hellish, and there is no mistaking which is which.

SANDRA FILIPPUCCI IS REPRESENTED BY THE MORRISON GALLERY


Ukraine Flower Series: Theatre Rubble II. June 2022. Mixed media on custom wood panel, 42 x 60 inches
June 4, 2022

What Rubble Really Means

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MY MOTHER’S RUBBLE

My British mother, once in awhile, would tell me about life in London during WWII. Nazi Germany was terrifying. The bombing incessant. Many she knew died under building rubble. Whole blocks disappeared. What were hallways, bedrooms, and bathrooms became pyramids of brick rubble. Prams in the air, pets flat and quiet. Her fiancée, a British pilot, died early in the war. Scarcity was everywhere.

Being a child, I had no way to truly understand the true meaning of “rubble.” It was only in high school in America, when we were given the assignment of writing about concentration camps, did I first begin to learn the magnitude and scope of what “rubble” could mean.

To reduce to rubble means you take entire societies and break them into fragments.

What you can’t blow up, you burn. As we each stood up in class and read our papers over the course of a week, almost everyone broke down crying. Mine was on Treblinka in occupied Poland where 300,000 were murdered (the last survivor of that camp died in 2018). Most of my classmates were Jewish and they already knew what rubble meant…the reminders were living with them – surviving grandparents with a number tattooed on their wrists. Classmate Wendy Aibel did not just cry. She wailed. For the rest of my life Kathe Kolowitz’s drawings reminded me of that wail in that classroom (as an adult Wendy Aibel-Weiss would be professionally involved in organizations that had to do with children and trauma).

Mother of Sandra Filippucci

Mother of Sandra Filippucci

Still, I did not connect those horrors to my mother. I thought she’d be pleased with my effort and scholarship but the mere mention of concentration camps was like pricking an overripe tumor.  Offal and bile emerged shrieking, “WHAT’S DONE IS DONE!,” and to get to my Goddamned chores. She wanted a smiley face life. Big flowers on the wallpaper, bright yellow, lots of jewelry, expensive whiskey. I did not understand her reaction but sensed that talking about any problem was a weakness. You were weak if you complained, which she confused with talking. So nothing important, traumatic or life-altering was ever discussed. She was so stuffed with secrets that we would not learn about them until after her death. The woman would have had her arm amputated before she would ever go to a psychiatrist. Say nothing. It will go away. Open another bottle. This all kept her unfamiliar with Love.

I was a confused outsider when we moved to Long Island. Although born in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Naval Yard – now transformed into shops and where I had my custom wood panels made – my background for Long Island was atypical – I was the military “brat” of divorced parents.

The parents of Sandra Filippucci

My American soldier father & British mother

I did not grow up with a library or a pool. We had baked beans in Europe and were glad of it. I had lived in England, France and Germany on American military bases in Post-war Europe and could speak some French and German. I had been left in a French convent in La Rochelle, France when my mother disappeared into America where she would construct another life (you can read about that experience here: SISTERS OF THE CLOTH), and eventually retrieve me back to New York. She was tough, fearless, determined to run from the horror.

An outsider I remained. One generally becomes an artist because of difficult or non-existent childhoods. And although I was protected from the explicit horrors that had happened around me, children like animals, sense sorrow, loss, bereavement, anxiety, fear.  My childhood was spent under the emotional rubble of secrets, silence, and denial.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FLOWERS

On February 24th, 2022 Ukraine was invaded by Russia. It soon became clear that this was a war not an invasion – a war on a society that Putin wanted to obliterate. I kept hearing the word, “rubble,” over and over and over. History repeating itself. For the first time, I could see my mother sheltering in those subways, hiding in those theater basements, ducking into those doorways.

My mother – along with an entire generation – probably had Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome but back then, you just got on with it.

The woman who had given birth to me was physically beautiful but she suppressed so many wretched moments that it made her very, very difficult. Ugly in fact. She suppressed the reality of war with flowers and pretty dresses and locked up her humanity so tightly one would think she was in fact, not human. Empathy seemed foreign to her. Violence was the go to reaction. If she hit something enough it would behave or maybe just go away. When you grow up with violence as a way of life – either as a culture or as a personal reaction to your own annihilation – it is considered normal to “sort someone out” with a punch in the face. She remained unfamiliar with Love for the rest of her Life. She got lost under the rubble.

Art was my way to cope with her. Art was my way to cope with Life.

I chose flowers to express my sadness and anger at yet more lives being lost, more generations affected, more rubble forming pyramid shapes all over Ukraine.

Flowers are of great cultural significance to the people of Ukraine. I also realized with this Series that flowers to my mother represented innocent times before the war.  With the god-like powers of 3d software, I could render my own flowers using wireframed cloth  that would react to gravity, light & texture. I felt that I had to “make” my own flowers out of fabric like shrouds for the countless lost. This Series has freed me in unexpected ways – the work has become more abstracted, expressionist and has provoked a deeper understanding of a difficult parent. 

My lesson about all of this is this. Perhaps I have worked too much from my head all my life not allowing emotions to become too loud. They seemed to just cause mayhem. Pandora’s Box. Why did I not understand until now that the great art out there in the world that I have long admired comes from a deeper place and that the emotions are loud. You FEEL the art. It took a horrific, unprovoked war in a distant place to jolt me into understanding that actual rubble creates generational emotional rubble. In understanding my mother, I am understanding myself. She was a survivor. So am I except that I wish always to be familiar with Love.


MOST RECENT FROM JUNE: Rubble One and Two. The residents sheltering in a local theater in Mariupol wrote in huge letters outside on the pavement, “CHILDREN.” They still got bombed. There was so much rubble it was considered a mass grave.

Ukraine Flower Series: Theatre Rubble II. FILIPPUCCI

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: “Theatre Rubble II.” June 2022. Mixed media on custom wood panel, 42″ x 60″

Ukraine Flower Series:

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: “Theatre Rubble I.” June 2022. Mixed media on custom wood panel, 42″ x 60″

 

SOME FROM PREVIOUS MONTHS: National Library, Drama Theater, apartment buildings, nuclear power plant, civilians, children’s center

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: National Library, June 2022. Mixed media on rag paper, 40 x 60

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: War Rubble – “National Library,” May 2022. Mixed media on rag paper, 40 x 60

Ukraine Flower Series: War Rubble Drama Theater. May 2022. Mixed media on rag paper, 40 x 60

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: War Rubble – “Drama Theater,” May 2022. Mixed media on rag paper, 40 x 60

FILIPPUCCI - WAR RUBBLE: Living Quarters, May 2022. Mixed media on rag paper, 40

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: War Rubble – “Living Quarters,” May 2022. Mixed media on rag paper, 40″ x 60″

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES:

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: “Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant,” March 2022. Mixed media on rag paper, 40″ x 60″

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: Civilians, March 2022. Mixed media on custom braced panel, 40 x 60

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES: “Civilians,” March 2022. Mixed media on custom braced panel, 40 x 60

UKRAINE FLOWER SERIES February 2022: Mixed media on rag paper, each 40″ x 60″


SORT OF AN ART BLOG
  • FILIPPUCCI UPCOMING EXHIBITION: Ukraine Flower Series - The Power of Defiance 2023
    ART REVIEW of Ukraine Series February 27,2023
  • Ukraine Flower Series: Theatre Rubble II. June 2022. Mixed media on custom wood panel, 42 x 60 inches
    What Rubble Really Means June 4,2022
  • NFTS - CLOTILDA OF CHESS | The Red Bishop ©Sandra Filippucci 2022
    My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Two July 7,2021
  • NFT Red Queen from Chess Collection - ©Filippucci 2021
    My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part One July 6,2021
  • PAX of Beatus, 3d porcelain ceramic ©FILIPPUCCI 2021
    The Trouble with Pink February 24,2021
Bakhmut, 2023. 40 x 60. It has been heartening to Bakhmut, 2023. 40 x 60. It has been heartening to hear how many of you have donated on the WCK.org site (World Central Kitchen) to help Ukraine survivors. The Ukraine Flower Series and Copper Tritscheller’s bronze horses are up until March 11th at Five Points Gallery in Torrington. @filippucciart @coppertritschellersculpture @fivepointsartsct @ukraine.ua @artistsofinstagram #ukraine #ukrainewar #wck #bakhmut #nowar #flowers #bakhmut #bakhmut_news_
ART REVIEW - One year to the day when the war star ART REVIEW - One year to the day when the war started.  FRACTURED GARDENS: Filippucci’s response to war in Ukraine highlighted at Five Points by TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN
February 23, 2023
 
The flower stems in Sandra Filippucci’s mixed media works are dark. So pitch, they are nearly invisible. They move upward with a crumbly impotence toward a blood-red background. Wherever these flowers are blooming is an obscure, agitated space, filled with violent lashing blacks and dribbles of sooty gray. The blossoms themselves seem synthetic and unraveled, like shiny, shredded strands of mylar balloons. The feelings they evoke – joy flogged with fear, innocence shattered into disintegration, are of a garden despoiled. Filippucci’s searing “Ukraine Flower Series: The Power of Defiance,” now at Five Points Gallery, is the artist’s response to the war in Ukraine. Many titles – Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv – reference specific sites or events. Occasionally, Filippucci will annotate them, in graphite cursive citations of dates and devastation.
Yet, most of the works speak for themselves, flower-like shapes of Ukraine’s pulverized garden. The works look like paintings, large, broad expanses of paint. Flower petals take the form of the cornette of a nun’s wimple, or the mashed remains of a vibrantly colored balloon. These motifs are often crushed together and mangled, picking up pieces of material like a tossed wad of gum. Here is a tube. There is a ribbon of netting. Over there are dagger-like shards of glass. All of them fuse into gobs of the flora and fuselage, a nasty but captivating clump of the natural and the martial.

In “War Babies,” Filippucci’s most colorful indictment of the war, a flower blooms with improbable vividness against an inky black background. (Excerpted from a longer article)
@filippucciart @coppertritschellersculpture @fivepointsartsct @ukraine.ua #ukraine #interiordesigner #artcollectorsoftheworld #worldkitchen #war #warart #contemporaryartist #connecticutartist #nwct #kentchronicles #cornwallctartists #fivepointsarts
Love to the shattered. Love to the sad. We all nee Love to the shattered. Love to the sad. We all need the strength of Love. @filippucciart #love #redheart #valentines #sad #hope #strength #heart #brokenheart #shooting #ukraine #ukrainewar
Opening last night in MINUS 4 degree weather! Than Opening last night in MINUS 4 degree weather! Thank you to all who braved the icy blasts and purchased prints to support World Central Kitchen. @wckitchen @filippucciart @coppertritscheller @fivepointsartsct #cornwallartists #cornwallart #ukraine #ukrainewar #ukraine🇺🇦 #ukraine_beauty #ukraineua #torrington #connecticutartist #defiance
Hope to see you at the Opening Friday, February 3r Hope to see you at the Opening Friday, February 3rd.  Five Points Gallery is at 33 Main Street in Torrington. Runs until March 11. Also new bronze horses by Copper Tritscheller. @filippucciart @coppertritscheller #galleryart #connecticut #torrington #cornwallartist #cornwallart #primarycolors #fivepointsgallery
Civilians II, 2023. Ukraine Flower Series: the Pow Civilians II, 2023. Ukraine Flower Series: the Power of Defiance solo opens Friday, February 3 at Five Point’s Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut. 33 Main Street. Copper Tritscheller will also have 6 horse bronzes from her new Resilience Series. @filippucciart @coppertritscheller @fivepointsartsct #ukraine #ukrainewar #ukraine🇺🇦 #ukraineart #antiwar #warart #bronze #soloexhibition #connecticut #torrington #litchfield #contemporaryartist #putinswar
Arts writer and gallery director Ann Landi flew to Arts writer and gallery director Ann Landi flew to New York from Santa Fe for a “museum fix,” and then came up to Cornwall to stay with me for a few days. Thrilled with her strong response to the Ukraine Flower Series - which is opening at The Five Points Gallery Feb 3 to March 11, 2023. Two pieces are also being shipped to The Wright Contemporary in Taos (Ann Landi’s gallery), which opens Jan 19. We had some great moments watching Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” Series and ok maybe some whisky was involved. @annlandi33 @filippucciart #ukraine #ukrainewar #contemporaryartists #studiolife #artswriters #artstudio #torrington #thewrightcontemporary #fivepointsartsct
Stay strong. Hoping for Peace in the Ukraine in th Stay strong. Hoping for Peace in the Ukraine in the New Year. @filippucciart 🇺🇦#peace #pax #2023 #warinukraine #ukraine #worldkitchen #strongwomen #womensupportingwomen  #joanofarc #resistance
VOTE! No excuses. @filippucciart #vote #voteblue # VOTE! No excuses. @filippucciart #vote #voteblue #vote2022 #votevotevote #ivoted #womensupportingwomen #womensrightsarehumanrights #womenmarch #cornwallct
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SANDRA FILIPPUCCI

Contemporary American artist based in Connecticut. 3d printed sculptures, painting, drawing. Part of a group of New York artists working with technology since the mid-eighties and was the first artist to have a digitally based solo exhibition at The Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan.

INSTAGRAM
Bakhmut, 2023. 40 x 60. It has been heartening to Bakhmut, 2023. 40 x 60. It has been heartening to hear how many of you have donated on the WCK.org site (World Central Kitchen) to help Ukraine survivors. The Ukraine Flower Series and Copper Tritscheller’s bronze horses are up until March 11th at Five Points Gallery in Torrington. @filippucciart @coppertritschellersculpture @fivepointsartsct @ukraine.ua @artistsofinstagram #ukraine #ukrainewar #wck #bakhmut #nowar #flowers #bakhmut #bakhmut_news_
ART REVIEW - One year to the day when the war star ART REVIEW - One year to the day when the war started.  FRACTURED GARDENS: Filippucci’s response to war in Ukraine highlighted at Five Points by TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN
February 23, 2023
 
The flower stems in Sandra Filippucci’s mixed media works are dark. So pitch, they are nearly invisible. They move upward with a crumbly impotence toward a blood-red background. Wherever these flowers are blooming is an obscure, agitated space, filled with violent lashing blacks and dribbles of sooty gray. The blossoms themselves seem synthetic and unraveled, like shiny, shredded strands of mylar balloons. The feelings they evoke – joy flogged with fear, innocence shattered into disintegration, are of a garden despoiled. Filippucci’s searing “Ukraine Flower Series: The Power of Defiance,” now at Five Points Gallery, is the artist’s response to the war in Ukraine. Many titles – Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv – reference specific sites or events. Occasionally, Filippucci will annotate them, in graphite cursive citations of dates and devastation.
Yet, most of the works speak for themselves, flower-like shapes of Ukraine’s pulverized garden. The works look like paintings, large, broad expanses of paint. Flower petals take the form of the cornette of a nun’s wimple, or the mashed remains of a vibrantly colored balloon. These motifs are often crushed together and mangled, picking up pieces of material like a tossed wad of gum. Here is a tube. There is a ribbon of netting. Over there are dagger-like shards of glass. All of them fuse into gobs of the flora and fuselage, a nasty but captivating clump of the natural and the martial.

In “War Babies,” Filippucci’s most colorful indictment of the war, a flower blooms with improbable vividness against an inky black background. (Excerpted from a longer article)
@filippucciart @coppertritschellersculpture @fivepointsartsct @ukraine.ua #ukraine #interiordesigner #artcollectorsoftheworld #worldkitchen #war #warart #contemporaryartist #connecticutartist #nwct #kentchronicles #cornwallctartists #fivepointsarts
Love to the shattered. Love to the sad. We all nee Love to the shattered. Love to the sad. We all need the strength of Love. @filippucciart #love #redheart #valentines #sad #hope #strength #heart #brokenheart #shooting #ukraine #ukrainewar
Opening last night in MINUS 4 degree weather! Than Opening last night in MINUS 4 degree weather! Thank you to all who braved the icy blasts and purchased prints to support World Central Kitchen. @wckitchen @filippucciart @coppertritscheller @fivepointsartsct #cornwallartists #cornwallart #ukraine #ukrainewar #ukraine🇺🇦 #ukraine_beauty #ukraineua #torrington #connecticutartist #defiance
Hope to see you at the Opening Friday, February 3r Hope to see you at the Opening Friday, February 3rd.  Five Points Gallery is at 33 Main Street in Torrington. Runs until March 11. Also new bronze horses by Copper Tritscheller. @filippucciart @coppertritscheller #galleryart #connecticut #torrington #cornwallartist #cornwallart #primarycolors #fivepointsgallery
Civilians II, 2023. Ukraine Flower Series: the Pow Civilians II, 2023. Ukraine Flower Series: the Power of Defiance solo opens Friday, February 3 at Five Point’s Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut. 33 Main Street. Copper Tritscheller will also have 6 horse bronzes from her new Resilience Series. @filippucciart @coppertritscheller @fivepointsartsct #ukraine #ukrainewar #ukraine🇺🇦 #ukraineart #antiwar #warart #bronze #soloexhibition #connecticut #torrington #litchfield #contemporaryartist #putinswar
Arts writer and gallery director Ann Landi flew to Arts writer and gallery director Ann Landi flew to New York from Santa Fe for a “museum fix,” and then came up to Cornwall to stay with me for a few days. Thrilled with her strong response to the Ukraine Flower Series - which is opening at The Five Points Gallery Feb 3 to March 11, 2023. Two pieces are also being shipped to The Wright Contemporary in Taos (Ann Landi’s gallery), which opens Jan 19. We had some great moments watching Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” Series and ok maybe some whisky was involved. @annlandi33 @filippucciart #ukraine #ukrainewar #contemporaryartists #studiolife #artswriters #artstudio #torrington #thewrightcontemporary #fivepointsartsct
Stay strong. Hoping for Peace in the Ukraine in th Stay strong. Hoping for Peace in the Ukraine in the New Year. @filippucciart 🇺🇦#peace #pax #2023 #warinukraine #ukraine #worldkitchen #strongwomen #womensupportingwomen  #joanofarc #resistance
VOTE! No excuses. @filippucciart #vote #voteblue # VOTE! No excuses. @filippucciart #vote #voteblue #vote2022 #votevotevote #ivoted #womensupportingwomen #womensrightsarehumanrights #womenmarch #cornwallct
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“Captivated by the mystique of Joan of Arc,  Sandra Filippucci passionately creates iconic imagery that is relevant to the issues of our time.” –Linda Durham, Curator for Voices of Light Exhibition

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