Alba Polenghi Lisca (1935 – 2021) was an Italian painter who was strongly interested in the movement of fluid geometries.
She attended the Brera Art Academy in Milan under the guide of Achille Funi and Mauro Reggiani who were both significant figures in the abstractionism movement. At Brera, Lisca also studied ceramics with Roland Hetner and, later, the art of engraving. As a painter she took an active part in several collective and personal exhibitions.
In 1983, Lisca’s artistic and pictorial studies acquired a third dimension: the use of metal. The training as a painter is very notable in her wearable art. Hence it is not surprising that Guido Ballo emphasised the following on the occasion of her first personal exhibition: ‘the clearness of the procedures used, her predilection for a sober and restrained overall vision, the rhythmical precision of her compositions, their measured tone.’
Lisca’s rigorous study of volumes, the composition of simple elements such as prisms and pyramids first and, later on, the cone and all curved lines, provide her wearable art pieces with volumes that reflect light in as many intensities as there are facets. As a result, her artistic research produces forms austere and restrained, and even when she works with firms she tries to give the wearable art pieces rigorously clean lines, enhancing spatial volumes, superimposing layer on layer and using different shades of gold.
‘When I started creating jewels, I discovered the beauty and strength that shapes can communicate. Dialogue becomes enriched with another element, the intrinsic relationship between surface and shape. My artistic discovery took a step forward, revealing a relationship with the material, the hard metal sheet, which achieves a structure made of precision, rigor, and measure. The jewel, an artistic object, was to move from the meaning sought within a chromatic semantic field, to a language of form and volume. Acquiring shape the surface takes on itself to transmit lights and shadows, the form is cut to generate another surface, animated to make the geometry fluid. The creativity of an artist, I believe, is expressed in the dialogue that she has with herself. An intense, continuous inner conversation that becomes the guiding principle of his activity, and as a result of his life. Above all, we are looking, we are searching, we are undertaking a journey, this path leads to the products of our work.’ – Alba Polenghi Lisca.
