21.11.2024 — 16.2.2025

Dentro il verziere (Inside the Orchard) focuses on a series of precious brocades hand-woven by Graziella Guidotti over a 10-year period that tell the story of the Lady of Vergy, the subject of a 13th-century French chivalric poem that was later translated into Florentine rhymes in La Dama del verziere.

This is the only figurative series in Graziella Guidotti's vast, predominantly abstract textile production in which the decorative motifs arise directly from the weave structures, often derived from a reinterpretation of the of the textile structures of Renaissance silks and popular fabrics defined as ‘paesani’ to which the weaver has dedicated countless studies and research, considering them an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

handwoven brocaded textiles

In the weaver’s skilled hands, this tale is told through a series of 24 brocaded textiles, transforming the garden into a space that is both dreamlike and metaphysical. Fantastical birds stand in for the characters, accompanied by a few symbolic elements to anchor the unfolding narrative. For this figurative series Graziella adopted a fragmented narrative approach, where the forms are radically cropped to fit the narrow, elongated format dictated by the loom, creating a composition that expands the viewer’s imaginative space while imbuing the story with lightness and abstraction.
This recalls the tradition of Eastern painting on vertical strips of fabric or parchment, designed to be read from top to bottom.

Graziella’s profound historical knowledge and mastery of the loom allow her to evoke and reinterpret the tradition of brocaded fabric - from their origins in China, through the Italian Renaissance, to later French manufacture. Reformulated into a contemporary language, her work transforms fabric into a material space that translates poetic verse into image, interweaving the threads of narrative with the tangible body of the weaving.

FOLK FABRICS: TESSUTI “PAESANI”

The exhibition aims to highlight another aspect of Graziella Guidotti's textile production: the research and experimentation with textiles for furniture.
On display are a series of small studies, created with an original weaving technique (Gra-Gui weave) pioneered and developed by Graziella Guidotti based on the “paesani” folk fabrics and progressing to industrial production on electronic looms. The Gra-Gui weave has been copyrighted, testifying to her extraordinary inventive ability that throughout her life has led her to study and hybridise the ancient and traditional with the modern, manual weaving with design for industry.

The exhibition in part of “On Weaving” cultural program, supported by