Biography

Marisa Tesauro (b.1976) works and lives in Turin, Italy. She creates sculptures, installations and works on paper that reframe ubiquitous industrial design structures and materials as monuments to consider our consumption and values. Her everyday forms and materials become vessels of memory and presence. Coming from a culture that reveres preservation of statues, ceramics, and ancient stones, she has developed a deep sensitivity to how materials carry history. She is especially interested in packing materials: transient forms with architectonic qualities, designed solely to protect what we deem valuable. Marking time through their wear, intent and impermanence and anchoring traces of human experience within the built environment. Tesauro elevates these overlooked fragments that reveal our histories, shifting them from the temporary and disposable to something preserved, seen, and remembered.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including La Specola museum, Florence, Italy, Queens Museum of Art, New York, Eyebeam Gallery, New York, La Escoscesa, Barcelona, Spain, Stand4 Gallery, New York, Martina Simeti, Milan, Italy, Project:ARTspace, New York, Andrew Edlin Gallery and the Bronx Museum of Art, New York.

Tesauro’s site-specific installations include Hunter’s Point South, New York, Monasterace Superiore, Italy, Old American Can Factory, New York, Bay Ridge Saw, New York and No Longer Empty at the Andrew Freedman Home. Tesauro has published two artist books, Strutture with Content Series and Relics in the Construction of Place to document the site-specific work and research at Hunter’s Point South, 2016-17. She participates and collaborates with archeologists working in the Magna Grecia area of Italy and has given lectures relating to her research and work within the archeology field.

She is the recipient of an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Emergency Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Yvonne Force Award amongst others. She was formerly an artist in the Artist Pension Trust and was an artist in residence at the Queens Museum Studio in the Park, Bronx Museum of Arts: Artists in the Marketplace and received a full-fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Tesauro received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001.