Consuelo Mura, born in Rome, has built an artistic path based on experimentation and the search for a visual language capable of dialoguing with the past and the present. Her art, influenced by studies of traditional and contemporary painting techniques, develops along a mythical and philosophical narrative recalling the ancient concept of arbor inversa: the inverted tree symbolizing the connection between the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm.

Since 2006, she has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Italy and abroad.

Myth, like a kaleidoscope of strength and fragility, has the great ability to narrate human events from past to present.

In the work RESILIENTIA NATURAE, the artist works by subtraction.

Earth, water, and light constitute the body of the works, essential and interdependent elements in the balance and imbalance of life itself, in its continuous cycle of loss and rebirth.

On the canvases, with precise randomness, the natural elements represented by the artist through paint, sand, and gold, join and separate forming imaginary and imaginative geographies.

The weave, created by the artist on the canvas, represents the slow, repetitive, and ancient gesture that women, with wisdom and patience, could transform into a true meditative act, achieving greater awareness and inner calm.

The loom with its weave was a place of words, stories, and intimacy between mothers, daughters, and granddaughters, where ancient knowledge was passed down and life itself was learned to be woven.

From 2006 to today, she has exhibited her works in various solo and group exhibitions in galleries, institutional spaces, and international fairs across Italy, the United States, China, Turkey, Poland, and Canada.

In 2007, her work was selected among the finalists for the Premio Celeste, and in the same year she held her first solo exhibition in New York.

In 2010, one of her works was selected for Italian Olympic Spirit – 2010 Winter Olympics, Casa Italia Coni, Vancouver.

In 2019, at the Macro Museum in Via Nizza, she performed two performances and later participated in a residency organized within the museum.

In 2020, she participated in a charity auction for the Italian Red Cross against COVID, curated by Galleria Rosso20sette.

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I have looked at women, women who wait, who observe, women who understand and change the world. It all began with the study of female body language, legs portrayed in positions expressing intimate and personal moods. I imagine these scenes as fragments in which time no longer exists or is suspended for an instant in a dreamlike memory. Over the years, this study led me to change perspective: I looked at nature as a woman who resists, generates life, protects, punishes, and forgives. I drew inspiration from historical and mythological icons to seek in those imaginary lives morals different from the classical and canonical ones, turning them feminine and analyzing them.

In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, it is the will to know and courage that move Psyche, who with strength and independence will face extremely difficult trials. This long journey not only leads her to find her beloved but, even more, herself, until she reaches equality with Cupid, when she is transformed into a Goddess. I reflected on how many women today still face difficulties and cannot find the strength to react, starting from themselves.

Among the various myths I could have drawn from to address the subject, one in particular struck me. I reinterpreted the story of “Apollo and Daphne” from Ovid's Metamorphoses in a contemporary key. Daphne is a young nymph, a woman who has taken a vow of chastity to Diana, but behind this vow lie not religious messages but a need for emancipation from a reality dominated by men, violence, and the violation of her freedom.

Indeed, Cupid, envious, makes Apollo fall in love with Daphne, knowing it would not be reciprocated, making the nymph a victim of this capricious quarrel between gods.

Men who play with love, reducing it to a body to possess, an obsession that does not respect a woman’s freedom.

Finally, in Daphne's metamorphic act, when exhausted she calls upon her mother Gaia, we witness the martyrdom of a woman who becomes a symbol of the struggle for resistance. The laurel tree, which Apollo, in the myth, turns into an evergreen plant, represented for the ancients eternal life, immortal like the message of resistance that Daphne, unknowingly, still conveys today.

“I represent the instant as if it were a fragment of a memory, of which only a small detail can be focused on, a piece that can tell an entire story.

The gesture of a woman who is simultaneously wife and lover, mother and child, a multifaceted woman to be seen as through a kaleidoscope. The titles of the works indicate a possible path and are not meant to be a mandatory route toward interpretation, but leave the observer free to imagine according to their own suggestion.

I use, as if they were sketches, photographs I have taken, but also images borrowed from the media, focusing only on the detail that interests me.”

Gianluca Marziani for the catalog “Le leggi del desiderio”

...“The artist turns her eye around the female body. She fixes on the canvas single details within neutral yet welcoming contexts, letting various physiques float in abstract spaces that reveal the intimate consciousness of private space. We see women on the canvas through partial shots that conceal their faces, giving beauty the impact of an evocative archetype. Legs, form-fitting dresses, sexy high-heeled shoes, calibrated postures where every action responds to a rigorous analysis of iconographic eros. Everything plays on the fragment, on the body's attitudes that become painting. A figurative journey on the fine diaphragm between photographic realism and pictorial fluidity. A project where the ghostly softness of bodies contrasts with the precision of accessories and feet, rendered by the artist as a magnetic catalyst distributing energy across the entire project.”...

Giuseppe Di Bella for Con-fine magazine

...“One cannot escape the beauty of observing eyes, eyes that in that range of veiled perceptions, eyes with the ability to capture nuances and subtle psychological conditions can belong only to a female artist: at least the last twenty years are full of names and careers of female painters showing the powers emerging from the tensions of the specificity of Art-woman. And thus, without shouting, through a clear catalog, Consuelo Mura also illustrates the path that finds mediation as a form of current strategy and synthesis between antinomies to suggest the minimal moments, yet full of unease and pathos of the private.”

The hybrid approach to reality is a way to evaluate the limits or missed possibilities of previous painting and focus it on the theoretical and concrete vacuum slide. The sense of detachment transforms to stage the solitude to which our era seems condemned, private solitude, of women living in empty houses, almost entirely without presences that can enjoy the opulence of their offering. The space where the figures stick is a void created by subtraction, emptying, or erasure like in Photoshop, a silent background open to any silhouette definition. That ability to investigate unconventional art brings an infinite series of illustrious names that the artist has internalized to mask tradition or the classic of her works in a lived experience in which the woman removing or inserting the sky-blue heels has the same value as a bather lifting her underskirt at the beach. A voyeurism allowed only to art, in this case, to gender art.”...

Marina Marinelli for the catalog “Di Amore e Psiche e di altri corpi”

...“The models taken as inspiration become highly personal material in the Roman painter’s work, who transforms mythopoetic figures into appearances from daily life. With her unmistakable style, she frames the anatomy of bodies in a static, abstract, and timeless dimension while focusing the shot on a detail extracted from a general context. The presences populating the real world and that of myth engage in a subtle dialectical game and reference exchange.

Mura starts from the representation of “other bodies” painted in black and white, with an almost marble-like consistency, where color is reserved only for specific accessories such as shoes and dresses, evoking a highly seductive feminine world. Following an ideal path consistent with her pictorial research, the Roman painter arrives at the reproduction of the actual statue, overturning the marble monochrome in favor of color, to which she entrusts new expressive faculties and even playful accents.”...

...“Consuelo Mura’s painting is contemplative, viewing the human figure as a silent and posed subject, a metaphor for the complex dynamics of reality and the chain of its possible meanings. The traditional perspective box becomes a conceptual container, within which time is devoid of duration: the interval of suspension and waiting.

This interval suggests the idea of a private realm and a condition of being dominated by expectation, desire, and memory. A snapshot of an instant becomes painting of the soul, in the surge of inevitably subjective emotions.

The solitude of bodies is only apparent. They presuppose the existence of another, a third party, as also demonstrated by the titles of the works in the form of sentences addressed to an invisible interlocutor.

In the indefinability of space-time, the “other bodies” occupy the canvas standing, sitting, or lying, letting themselves be seen and imagined in their anonymity. Psyche and Venus instead appear without pretense, with uncovered faces, finally revealing identity and role. Gods, as archetypes and models of behavior and personality, serve the function of belonging to the collective. To the world of those who paint and those who view art. To the world of all souls undertaking the difficult path of purification and redemption through love. With evocative and sensitive language, with refined framing and impeccable definition of forms, Consuelo Mura proposes a contamination between the physical and symbolic worlds without contradictions or discontinuity. An opportunity that forces us to listen to ourselves and an invitation to prolong the life of the artwork within our own existence.”...

Consuelo Mura: “Every gesture of the geisha is measured, the food she brings to her mouth must not touch her lips, her hair is gathered in a perfect hairstyle requiring extremely long preparation, the kimono and extremely high thong sandals force her to take tiny steps.

An educated, elegant woman, a perfect woman whose only task is to please and satisfy the man. I look to the West and see a woman squeezed into a corset that does not allow her to breathe until she faints.

At every latitude, a woman was wanted who could not move, run, sweat, make mistakes—in short, be free like a man.

Even in ballerinas we are fascinated by the beauty of the foot, the ankle wrapped tightly in the pointe shoe laces, but often inside is a deformed and suffering foot, forced into an unnatural position. Here I cannot help but think of the “lotus feet,” the famous tiny feet of noble Chinese women deformed at age 5-6 and enclosed in very small shoes, causing severe suffering.” (C.M.)

The Bow to Nature series arises from the need to look at our planet with love, care, and respect, aware of its fragility.

These works are inspired by Gandhi’s precious words, who always supported the deep connection between humans and nature, because the survival of one is impossible without the other.

His words:

“The world has enough for man’s needs, but not for his greed.”

“You and I are only one. I cannot harm you without harming myself.”

“The life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I find that the more defenseless a creature is, the more right it has to be protected by man from the cruelty of other humans.”

“A better planet is a dream that begins to come true when each of us decides to improve ourselves.”