Nenne Sanguineti Poggi was born in Savona in 1909 into a family where culture, arts and letters had been highly considered for generations. She was part of a Ligurian group where she began her work as a painter; she then lived for thirty years in Eritrea absorbing the country’s culture: her painting remained permeated by its influence. She worked for the Ethiopian Government and for private clients, making large murals in mosaic, ceramic, gouaches, concrete relief in official buildings, schools, banks, hotels, business offices and private and public chapels. She returned to Italy and settled in Finale Ligure where the urgency of her art was at first filtered through inner calm into African symbolism, and then transformed into the serenity of spaces, calculated and dreamed of, upon which were inscribed fragments of ancient illuminated Ethiopian scrolls and texts. In the process, Eastern and Western cultures merged to form the same dream, the same search for a unique sacredness. Totally independent until the end, she moved to another life, surrounded by her beloved angels, on the afternoon of Palm Sunday (the subject of a very dear painting of hers) 2012, one month short of her 103rd birthday.
www.nennesanguinetipoggi.com
E-mail: deborah.sanguineti@gmail.com
Eternal warring (eternal violence), 1975
The white feminine symbol is fettered and incorporated, cannibalized, into the dark aspect of masculine violence. Her identity lost, she is caught in its mix and becomes the prime target and victim of that violence.