Elena Salza

Fall 2017 - Spring 2018

Elena Salza is a doctoral candidate in History of the Arts at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. Her thesis focuses on the development and peculiarities of Italian art, seen through the lens of the literary and artistic activity of Mario Diacono from the 1960s to the 1980s. She examines in an interdisciplinary way artistic literature and visual culture, and investigates the cultural exchanges between Italy and the United States by studying the role that a revisitation of the historical avant-gardes has played in fostering artistic experiments during those decades.

Salza studied at the University Roma Tre in Rome and at the School of the Vatican Library. She has degrees in both the humanities and art history, with a postgraduate qualification in Library Science. She has worked at the Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti in Rome, and been a member of the research team for the National Research Project The Multiplication of Art/Visual Culture in Italy, and a member of the cataloguing team of the Harald Szeemann Archive at the Getty Research Institute. She also studied at the École de Printemps in Paris in 2012, and at the Digital Humanities Fall School, Venice in 2015. In 2016 she was a recipient of the Branca Research Scholarship at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, also in Venice. Her articles have appeared in L’Uomo Nero (2011); “Arte moltiplicata. L’immagine del Novecento italiano nello specchio dei rotocalchi” in Studi di Memofonte (2013); and Arte a Firenze 1970-2015 (2016).

For her CIMA Fellowship, she will be evaluating the historical circumstances leading to Alberto Savinio’s re-appraisal in the 1970s and 1980s. In this context, she will investigate the terms and modalities of the reception of Savinio’s visual and literary imagery as a source for Francesco Clemente’s painting, placing Savinio’s rediscovery within the framework of the growing critical attention given to some of the new positions in the field of contemporary art.