Sandra Filippucci. Portrait by Audrey Derell.
There is an ongoing fascination with the struggle between good and evil that pulses through all Filippucci’s work.
Ukraine Flower Series Review by Ann Landi, Arts writer & Director of the Wright Contemporary Gallery.
Of all the artists I have interviewed and profiled in the course of 30 years as an art journalist, Sandra Filippucci remains unique for having pursued a single subject throughout most of her long career - Joan of Arc. The war in Ukraine changed that.
Her new body of work, “Ukraine Flower Series,” marks a departure into more expressionist territory, and, for the most part, they are not the emblems of happiness, sensuality, or even fragility that we find in well-known floral iterations, from the Dutch masters through Georgia O’Keeffe and Andy Warhol. They are generally as savage as the war itself and often appear to be exploding, the stamens of a normal flower transformed into dangerous projectiles, delicate petals suggesting bandages or punctured flesh. Their beauty is of the same sort as a de Kooning “woman”—she may be in your face, but she is also irresistible. This series expresses anger and sadness about the war in Ukraine, but is also an homage to Filippucci’s British mother who survived the London Blitz in 1940-41:
“Five days after the first bombs dropped on Ukraine in February 24 2022, I envisioned flowers being destroyed. Seeing terrified Ukrainian families on the news - huddled in subways - suddenly jolted me back into memories of my British mother doing exactly that…hiding in subways during the WWII bombings. She would occasionaly speak about that time—a horrendous nine-months-long siege that killed something like 50,000 civilians—but mostly my mother preferred to suppress the memories and cover up her terror with flowers. Everywhere she could, there were giant flowers on the walls, on the carpets, on her clothing. My mother did not like receiving actual flowers because she hated to watch them die.”
There is an ongoing fascination with the struggle between good and evil that pulses through all Filippucci’s work, whether it’s Joan against the English or the flowers that will never bloom in the Ukraine. Memories of a difficult Catholic girlhood also permeate her subject matter, which, she says, “is all autobiographical one way or another.”
A pioneer in digital fine art since 1984, her process is a hybrid of 3d renders and mark-making - fascinating in and of itself - but more importantly - she is a passionate artist at a time when passion is not the most prized asset in the art world. A cool, oblique, or ironical stance are those that most call out to critics (I’m thinking of artists like Cindy Sherman or Laura Owens). But Filippucci is one-hundred-percent full-bore committed to her subjects and her materials in a way that recalls the great Abstract Expressionists of 60 and 70 years ago. There was nothing half-baked or self-conscious about their approaches to painting or reactions to the political climate in which they came of age.
And at a time when we are every day confronted by very real instances of good and evil in the world, Filippucci reminds us of an era when honest emotional responses were the norm.
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Filippucci attended the Maryland Institute of Art on scholarship, and studied painting, drawing and printmaking. The artist began working with computers in 1984. Filippucci then became part of a group of New York artists working with technology since the mid-eighties, and was the first artist to have a solo digital & video exhibition at The Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan.
Mozaik Art LA Award winner, Sandra Filippucci, has lectured and had exhibitions and solos at the Museum of American Illustration, Colgate University, Syracuse University, The Morrison Gallery, The Maryland Institute, the Verbum Digital Gallery and in Santa Fe: Evoke Gallery, Center of Contemporary Arts, Linda Durham Gallery, Turner Carroll, and the Owings Dewey Gallery. The artist has contributed work to numerous charities including The Kent School, Women Against Violence, World Central Kitchen, Artists Medical Fund and Habitat for Humanity. Her work is in many private, public, and corporate collections.