Milli Gandini
At the Thirty-eighth Biennale dell’Arte in Venice in 1978 entitled Dalla natura all’arte dall’arte alla natura (From nature to art from art to nature), at Spazio Aperto, Magazzini del Sale alle Zattere, the Feminist Group “Immagine” of Varese and the “Donne Immagine Creatività” Group of Naples found space for their installations entitled Dalla Creatività come Maternità – Natura al Controllo (Contro Ruolo) della Natura (From Creativity as Maternity – Nature to Control (Against Role) of Nature. In the photograph in the collection, Milli Gandini is photographed in front of a panel made up of postcards representing the phases of the moon that are associated with the archetypal dimension of the relationship with the Great Mother, as if to recall a primordial female divinity.
Born in 1941 in Varese, she has worked as an associate in her husband Innocente Gandini’s industrial design studio since 1968. A graphic designer, she works in advertising and designs patterns and textures for furnishing fabrics. From 1975 she designed jewellery and furnishing fabrics and began the series of exhibitions devoted to the successful cycle La mamma è uscita.
After moving away from political militancy, in the 1980s she achieved her greatest successes both as an artist – with works steeped in irony and a subtle eroticism, not without feminist ancestry in denouncing gender stereotypes – and as a gallery owner, in Milan, where she became a lively protagonist of the city’s cultural and political life.
In 1989 she began the Milanese experience of Gallery Night, the first exhibition space in the world to open at night in the suburban area of Viale Certosa, also hosting Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.
She died in Castiglione Olona in 2017. Posthumous group exhibitions include: The Unexpected Subject. 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy (2019, Milan) and Kochen
Putzen Sorgen. Care-Arbeit in der Kunst seit 1960 / Cooking Cleaning Caring, Care-Work in the Arts since 1960 (2023, Bottrop).