An exhibition that is like a dress to wear. A reflection on colour and sound, where colours become numbers and their relationships create rhythms. An exhibition conceived as a creative workshop, where painting, sculpture, poetry, music, cinema and performance coexist and simultaneously dress – and redress – our bodies in motion.

Curated by Paola Nicolin

Sul vestito lei ha un corpo. Note su Sonia Delaunay [On her dress she wears a body. Notes on Sonia Delaunay] is an exhibition project by Meris Angioletti and Ulla von Brandenburg, reflecting on the figure of the Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay, ( 1885, Odessa, Ukraine–1979, Paris, France).

As an artist capable of implementing the project of a futuristic refoundation of the world, Sonia Delaunay cultivated a particular predisposition to create abstract paintings that trespass the physical frame. She worked on the dynamics and interaction of colours to develop a very personal expressive vocabulary, which is often identified with the concept of simultaneity. Together with her husband Robert, the artist tirelessly investigated the perceptual nature of colour, the pure essence of painting, relying only on colour, and extended this pictorial position engaging simultaneously in various disciplines – from painting to design, from fashion to poetry, from cinema to sculpture and the publishing industry – within a unique aesthetic rendering of multiple aspects of life.

In 1913, Sonia turned a dress into her manifesto: her first “simultaneous dress” was built through a combination of colours and shapes, and embodied the message of an anti-modern, androgynous modernity, neither masculine nor feminine, fast-moving, and fluid, where the body is seen as a laboratory for aesthetic and social research. From the vast network of poets and writers surrounding the couple during their life in Paris, Blaise Cendras (1887–1961), friend and poet, composed a poem in honour of the dress, Sur la robe elle a un corps, from which the title of this exhibition is taken.

The project stems from an invitation to two contemporary artists – Meris Angioletti (Bergamo, 1977, working and living in Paris) and Ulla von Brandenburg (Karlsruhe 1974, working and living in Paris) – to reflect on the figure of Sonia Delaunay, and particularly on the experience of Atelier Simultané (1923–1934), an extension of her Paris home atelier in Boulevard Malesherbes, where Sonia Delaunay lived with her husband Robert.