IMPRINT BEACHWEAR

From Monday 6 May 2024, the Museo del Tessuto e del Costume in Spoleto will host Imprint Beachwear, an exhibition project by the artist Cristina Bonucci, created in collaboration with the IIS Spagna-Campani Fashion Course. Between the end of 2023 and early 2024, Bonucci developed sketches for a line of beachwear, in which her interest in fashion intertwined with her 30 years' experience as a visual artist. Subsequently, after a meeting between the artist and the teachers and students of the Fashion Course at the Spagna-Campani Institute, prototypes were made using white and ecru linen, which bear the imprints of anatomical parts on their surface. Not immediately recognisable, these traces give the beachwear a characterisation and a chromatic ignition, with the decontextualised human body prints veering towards an abstract dimension. The series is made up of five prototypes, accompanied by four works on paper and canvas that feature prints, a recurring element of Cristina Bonucci's artistic practice. Since 1999, in fact, the artist had been creating works with anatomical parts, brought together within the pictorial cycle Labili tracce d'Esistenza (Faint Traces of Existence). With Imprint Beachwear, Bonucci's production, which this year reaches its 30th year of activity, is enriched by a further, unprecedented chapter, thanks to this link between visual art and fashion design, in the wake of the countless moments of encounter between the two worlds, which have seen designers take inspiration from fashion and vice versa. In this case, the fashion designer coincides with the artist herself. The exhibition project, which will be on display until 2 June during the Museum's opening hours, is fully in line with the new course of the Civic Museums of Spoleto, based on a continuous exchange with the territory, starting with schools. Imprint Beachwear also intends to give prominence to the IIS Spagna-Campani Fashion Course, a true excellence in the Spoleto area, also thanks to the commitment of headmistress Rita Scagliola and teachers Giuseppina Giardini, Angela Foti and Federica Palombini, who have followed the project and collaboration with Cristina Bonucci from its genesis. Furthermore, on Saturday 11 May, some of the prototypes on display will be featured in the fashion show in Piazza Pianciani, a few metres away from the Fabric and Costume Museum, during the 'Waiting for the Stage' event.
Saverio Verini, Director of the Civic Museums of Spoleto