Maddalena Zadra

Installation view - The End of Summer Lights, Anderson Contemporary, London (2021)

Maddalena Zadra is a London-based Italian artist who works across painting, drawing, printmaking, and textile based installations.

Zadra’s work touches upon aspects of the tactile and the sensual whilst remaining playful through subtly contrasting vulnerability and eroticism. Referencing a variety of cultures and historical aesthetics, she explores symbolic meaning and storytelling in her practice, creating multi-layered, open scenarios.

The artist often integrates different ways of mark making and its relationship with surface, exploring the limits of collage, drawing and print, and inviting audiences to explore their own understanding around the flexibility of painting, and the possibilities of craftsmanship.

Zadra, with her work, is trying to create a way of narrating and representing feelings and moments, a bit like poetry. Varying between colour combinations, forms and shapes she likes to play in subtle ways with the viewers’ emotions created by movements of figurative forms and direct mark making that refers to cave art and pure drawings.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

The End of Summer Lights, Anderson Contemporary, London (2021)

Selected Group Exhibitions

Between Dog and Wolf, Parlour, London, UK (2022)

Cromologia. Percorsi asincroni nell’arte e nella cultura trentina, Cles, IT (2022)

Collection 03, Felt Collections, London, UK (2022)

Myths of Observation, Hales Gallery, London, UK (2022)

If these Walls could Talk, London, UK (2022)

Hard as Nails, Quench Gallery, Margate, UK (2022)

N.43, Atelier LK, London, UK (2021)

ING Discerning Eye Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London, UK (2020)

Cats Mother, Her, She, Organhaus Gallery, Chongqing, CN (2019)

FBA Futures, Mall Galleries, London, UK (2019)

Platform Graduate Award, The De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018)

Recent Graduates, Affordable Art Fair, London, UK (2018)

Look, Freelands Foundation, London, UK (2018)

The Coyote's Daughter

Installation view - The End of Summer Lights, Anderson Contemporary, London (2021)

Time At Hogchester Arts

Residency period - Summer 2023

I think of my time at Hogchester Arts Residency with sweet nostalgia. I was lucky enough to have been chosen for a short-term residency that was personally very rewarding.

The time spent at the farm was a break from the intensity of the city and an opportunity to connect with myself. I would wake up in the yurt every morning with the sound of the roosters harmonising to me, walking on the still humid grass with the sun rising. I created routines; I would have coffee outside after saying hi to all the chickens and the goats. I spent the days by reading, listening and looking at my surroundings and having different walks every day.

Chantal and I would work alongside each other, share stories and explore our love for storytelling while Piper (Chantal’s dog) would sleep peacefully in the studio.

What a precious place to be, to me it was a peaceful, restoring time to be making art.