ABOUT MY ART

Statement
Artist Statement
I paint figures caught in charged social situations — moments when identity and authority press against one another. I am interested in scenes where private experience becomes visible in shared space, often in ways that feel exposed, uneasy, or unresolved.
My paintings are not meant to offer a single conclusion. Instead, they create space for reflection and for multiple points of view. I want viewers to feel drawn into the scene and to ask themselves where they stand within it. What do they assume? Whom do they trust? Where do their sympathies lie? What might they fail to see? In this way, the viewer becomes not only an observer, but also a witness, interpreter, and participant.
My current body of work uses the historical Inquisition tribunal as a dramatic and symbolic structure. The tribunal allows me to stage encounters between power and vulnerability, accusation and defense, belief and coercion. Its architecture, rituals, and hierarchies provide a visual language through which I can explore how judgment is performed, enforced, and internalized.
Although these works draw on history, they are not about the past. I am interested in how similar patterns emerge in contemporary life: in public scrutiny, ideological certainty, social pressure, and the impulse to divide people into the accused, the righteous, and the silent. By bringing historical and contemporary references together, I ask how systems of judgment shape not only institutions, but also personal relationships, collective behavior, and ethical choice.
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.” –Picasso

​
Bio
​Elisabetta Marmolo is an Italy-born, Maryland-based oil painter whose multidisciplinary practice draws on history, literature, and philosophy. Her paintings create visual narratives rooted in lived experience, using the personal and self-portraiture as points of entry into broader questions of identity, belonging, conflict, and human meaning. Attuned to the tensions of contemporary social life, her work explores how individual stories intersect with collective memory, cultural roots, and the shifting dynamics that shape how we relate to one another.
Her solo exhibitions include Yogic Portraits: Paths from the Self to the Universal at the Gandhi Memorial Center and Crossroads Gallery, and the forthcoming War and Peace: A Hero’s Journey at Muse Gallery, Workhouse Art Center. Recent small-group exhibitions include Synthesis at the Katzen Arts Center and Radici (Roots) at Glenview Mansion Art Gallery. She was selected for the juried 2026 Biennial Maryland Regional Exhibition, and her work has been featured in several publications.


Download CV: