Maria Agnese Pistoia was born in Pesaro, in Central Italy, but identifies as salentina, having spent her first 18 years in Lecce. She graduated in Conference Interpreting at the University of Trieste and later obtained a certificate as a teacher of Italian as a foreign language from the University of Venice.

 

Agnese never studied art, but honed her sketching skills with ballpoint pen drawings throughout her childhood and early adulthood. After moving to Germany, she gave up drawing and, although she passed her passion for art on to her children, she never picked up a paintbrush herself until two decades later.

 

At Jörk Kalkreuter's Kunstschule in Altona, Agnese approached painting for the first time when she was 40 years old, learning to mix pigments, stretch her own canvases, and paint with egg tempera. This technique reaches back to ancient Egypt, and was the predominant medium in European paintings until the 16th century; it relies on cross-hatching and overlays of glazing to achieve depth and subtle textures and tones.

 

She has recently returned to drawing with pencils, fineliners and pen brushes, and has forayed into using acrylic binders with her pigments.

 

Agnese is a great admirer of Renaissance art and its symbolism, and is interested in the philosophy behind sumi-e and the aesthetics of ukio-e.

 

Her next project is ceramics.

 

We use words to define the world as we perceive it, and make it intelligible to others; and our word choice also defines us. We use art to decipher our own world and make it intelligible to ourselves. Therefore art is a conversation with oneself.