Isabella Benshimol
February 22, 2024
Discover the work of Isabella Benshimol, mixed-media artist that has worked on a site specific installation in Milan and co designed a very special capsule collection with us.
Isabella Benshimol x paloma wool Milan exhibition, 2024
How would you define your work?
A series of connections woven between my intimacy and others' and the quest for an answer in everyday occurrences.
My work seeks to freeze ephemeral actions in time, gestures, and sensations of everyday domestic life. I am interested in using resin to freeze a moment or an action in time, like photography. I take everyday intimate actions as a starting point and re-enact, sculpt, and edit them to create and form a series of fossils or monuments to the unconscious. Often teething between something that appears unusual and bodily familiar.
Soft Shell Cochlea N.3, 2021
Used clothes, epoxy resin
70x56x6cm
Culebras, 2023
Used towels, epoxy resin
105x95x20cm
Half-naked Swan, 2022
Chrome Bathroom tap, used thongs, epoxy resin
24x24.5x32cm
Shy Swan, 2022
Chrome Bathroom tap, used T-shirt, epoxy resin
15x25x31cm
Sketches, 2024
Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, aluminium frame
45x32cm
What moves you to do what you do?
I just do it, and then it all makes sense. In the end, I feel a sense of relief.
Who are some of your creative (or non-creative) references?
My grandmother Maruja and her everyday rituals and love for life.
My country, Venezuela, has raw embroidered and engrained contrasts, and how great female artists like Elsa Gramcko, Mercedes Pardo, and Gego have portrayed this.
Bad Gyal, who allowed me to meet the most creative, inspiring, and stubborn person in the world while smoking a cigarette outside her first concert in Madrid, my partner Roberto.
Eggs.
Talk to us about the titles of your work and the pieces you have created for this project.
In my practice, I usually avoid the direct representation of the body; I talk about the body and portray things a body might do without showing an actual body. Through this collaboration, I’ve created wearables that enhance this idea and pose questions about representation and intimacy, so it's almost as if I'm turning things around and seeing my practice from a different perspective. Titles like Fiu Fiu, Qué Tupé, and Madreperla come from Venezuelan everyday expressions. A lot of this comes from my grandmother Maruja.
Fiu Fiu top
Qué Tupé knit
Madreperla top
Do you have a dream project?
This one!!!!
I'm thrilled and happy with this project, its development, and how it turned out.
My friend Phillipa Zu Knyphausen wrote this about my practice, and I think it’s a beautiful way to explain my work.
“A thousand times the same floor, with a different movement, with a different intime clothing item, with a different day or night. Her action overflows in time and enters the space without a drop of innocence. It contains solid fluids and the ever-present mausoleum of the house she brings with her, allowing us to feel a sense of relief in how static it has become, so inert, but a moment nevertheless, a moment now silent. That sanitization produces envy, as to conduct your intimate and unguarded self so far beyond the habitual. The handles of a bathroom are elevated from the material of its context and resurface like a balsamed body, recognizable even in its unusual reutilization.”
See the capsule we made with Isabella here