Araminta Blue - Venti Trasversali- Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palazzo della Penna, Perugia

Venti Trasnversali - Crosswinds

by Araminta Blue

Curated by Riccardo Freddo

Invisible Forces, Permeable Bodies, and Contemporary Fate at Palazzo della Penna, Perugia

At Palazzo della Penna, where centuries of history are layered into walls, frescoes, and subterranean memory, Venti Trasversali (Crosswinds) brings together painting, myth, and perception in a single field of experience.

From 13 June to 26 July, the museum hosts Araminta Blue’s paintings that enter into dialogue with the nineteenth century fresco cycles of Antonio Castelletti and the architectural stratifications of the Museum itself. The result is an environment where time does not progress in linear form but circulates, returns, and accumulates.

A significant part of the research behind this exhibition also emerged after the artist’s residency at The Place of Silence, where prolonged immersion in the Umbrian landscape, stillness, and material slowness became a catalyst for a new pictorial language. In that context, perception shifted toward an awareness of invisible forces, reinforcing the themes that now structure the exhibition.

Araminta Blue is known for bringing figuration into dialogue with abstraction. Her works often appear abstract at first encounter, yet they gradually reveal figurative elements that surface through sustained looking. Images emerge slowly, as if carried within atmospheric layers, where bodies, gestures, and spatial hints remain partially dissolved and in constant formation. This shifting condition becomes central to her practice, where meaning is never immediate but disclosed over time.

Within this setting, motherhood, the body, and destiny emerge not as fixed themes but as shifting conditions. The body appears as threshold and container, a site of transformation where external forces and internal states continuously intersect. Care, vulnerability, and desire become visible as structures of experience rather than private emotions.

The exhibition unfolds across three movements. Light, Night, Wind.

Light opens the exhibition as perception and pressure. In the paintings, illumination becomes almost sentient, surrounding suspended figures and unrealized possibilities, the desire rises like a current, dissolving solidity into ascent.

Night turns inward. In Moonlit Visions, the body becomes aperture and passage, opening toward what cannot be seen. Warm Weighted Nights, the womb is rendered as dense matter, layered with memory, weight, and projection.

Wind opens onto the exhibition as its most radical condition. These paintings are oriented like a compass: north, east, west, and south: each direction becomes a way of feeling rather than locating, a shift in pressure, temperature, and emotional weather. The works are installed according to their true geographical orientation within the space, aligning image and architecture so that direction becomes both physical and experiential, as if the paintings themselves are positioned within the same world they depict. In Looking to the sky with your feet in the earth, stillness and motion coexist in fragile balance. In Blue Force, freedom is revealed as negotiation with invisible currents. In Amber Past, time appears embedded within matter itself.

A site specific intervention extends the exhibition into the tower of the museum, where four paintings have been conceived specifically in relation to the vertical architecture and atmospheric conditions of the space. The works, Night's Approach, 2026, Before the Storm, 2026, Striding Up Hills, 2026, and Before a Dawn Storm, 2026, form a sequence that unfolds as a rising and falling emotional structure, responding to the tower as both physical ascent and perceptual threshold.

As the curator Riccardo Freddo notes, Araminta Blue’s work holds painting in a state of continuous becoming, where figuration and abstraction remain unresolved and meaning emerges only through time, attention, and encounter.

Araminta Blue lives and works in London. She trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Ruskin School of Art. Her work has been shown internationally, including at Christie's and Bonhams. In 2024 she presented her first museum solo exhibition at MARV Museo d’Arte Rubini Vesin.

Her painting practice treats oil as a shifting material field, at times diluted into translucency, at others built into dense and tactile surfaces. Each work holds traces of construction and erasure, allowing process to remain visible as part of meaning.

Venti Trasversali is presented in collaboration with Rosenfeld Gallery