Francesca Ferrari is a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Art History and English from the Université de Lausanne. Her research and publications focus on twentieth-century European and Latin American art. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Animated Geometries: Abstraction and the Body in the Work of Alexandra Exter, Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Joaquin Torres-García” explores the convergence of geometric abstraction, the human body, and movement on a transnational scale during the 1920s. She has received fellowships from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin, and the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and has participated in scholarly conferences at Columbia University, Rutgers University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Toronto. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Rutgers Art Review, The Wollesen: University of Toronto Art Journal, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Miradas: Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula, and the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin.
In 1964, Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919–1988) exposed the anatomy of a painting by stripping canvas from a stretcher. For this work, which she created that year while living in São Paulo, Schendel left only a few traces of canvas, which can still be found tangled in the tacks that originally fastened it to the wooden support.
