Francesca Polizzi – Lunaria

RizzutoGallery is pleased to present Lunaria, a solo exhibition by Francesca Polizzi (Palermo, 1988). The exhibition – accompanied by a text by Daniele Franzella – marks a milestone in the artist’s research, presenting a body of previously unpublished works that explore the concept of natural ruin and the process of subtraction as a generative principle of form. The exhibition project begins with a reflection on Lunaria annua, a plant whose final configuration appears to be the result of a process of subtraction. When the fruit dries, the seed falls, and the matter empties, a thin membrane remains, a transparent disk that retains only the traces of its own existence.
Through references to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the aesthetic reflections of Georg Simmel, the exhibition explores ruin not as simple dissolution but as an active form. If for Simmel, ruin represents the reabsorption of human work by nature, in Polizzi’s vision, nature itself produces its own ruin, surrendering to a dimension of pure, lyrical apparition when biological life seems to retreat.
Francesca Polizzi’s research is distinguished by an archaeological approach to natural materials – raw wool, wax, rosin, brambles – transformed through rigorous manipulation. A series of raw wool felts printed with images of architecture and natural caves are then treated with the encaustic painting technique. This process achieves a layered concealment of the image, reducing its documentary value and restoring it as an opaque vision, a partially re-emerged mnemonic trace. In her unpublished ceramic series, raw wool is mixed directly into the unfired clay. During firing, the organic component burns and disappears, leaving cavities and imprints in the ceramic body that evoke fragments of vanished civilizations, portions of walls, exedras, and broken arches where the dialogue between matter and
absence becomes tangible. The works on display thus present themselves as relics of a profound sensorial dimension, the results of a transformation in which the fragment and the shell become acts of presence and permanence.

Francesca Polizzi (b. 1988) lives and works between Palermo and Düsseldorf. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, her research has received international recognition, including a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2025) and the acquisition of her works for the permanent collection of the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf (2024). Recent exhibitions include the Beringia project for Gibellina, Capital of Contemporary Art 2026, and the Pinakothek’a exhibition at Palazzo Sant’Elia in Palermo. Since 2022 she has been represented by RizzutoGallery.