Margherita Manzelli

Margherita Manzelli was born in 1968 in Ravenna, Italy, and lives and works in Milan. She has described her early schooling as a five-year architecture track at a high school in Ravenna, where the local system offered only an architecture pathway rather than a combined art-and-architecture one. She went on to study sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Ravenna in the 1980s before moving to Milan in the early 1990s to develop her practice.

Manzelli's work spans painting, drawing, writing, and performance, most consistently centered on oil paintings of adolescent girls and young women whose elongated or altered proportions and inward gazes suggest psychological states rather than conventional portraiture. Through the 2000s she held solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, both in 2004, and at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia in 2010. She has also appeared in major group surveys of Italian contemporary art, including Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution, 1968 to 2008 at Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man at Castello di Rivoli in 2014. Her most recent institutional survey, Margherita Manzelli. Le Signorine, ran at Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato from December 2024 to May 2025 and reviewed more than three decades of her practice.

No verified verbatim critic quotations from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile. What is documented is a steady institutional trajectory: monographic exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in the mid-2000s, inclusion in large-scale surveys of contemporary Italian art such as Italics at Palazzo Grassi, and a 2024 to 2025 retrospective-style survey at Centro Pecci that framed her more than three decades of work in painting, drawing, writing, and performance. That pattern of repeated museum programming, rather than any single quoted review, is the strongest evidence of her critical standing.

Manzelli's current galleries include greengrassi in London and Kimmerich Gallery in Berlin. She has also exhibited with Lehmann Maupin in New York, though published sources describe that as an exhibiting relationship rather than confirmed, current representation. Her public auction footprint is thin and difficult to verify. A price-database listing (Valutaopere) shows a EUR 900 figure for the drawing Progetto per tavolo Hannibal, dated 26 March 2019, but that source presents the figure as a valuation quotation rather than a confirmed hammer price, so it should not be treated as an auction record. Phillips' artist page lists several sold lots, with prices ranging roughly from GBP 2,159 to USD 8,750, but does not disclose the exact sale dates. Other figures that surface in market listings, such as a EUR 8,000 to 10,000 estimate on Being you my love at a 2011 Sotheby's sale of the Collezione Claudia Gian Ferrari, and a EUR 25,000 to 35,000 estimate on Il fondo del mare (Vulcano), are presale estimates rather than confirmed hammer prices. No reliable all-time auction record for this artist could be verified in research.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Manzelli, and her public auction record could not be reliably verified: the price-database figures and gallery-cited estimates found in research are either valuations or presale estimates rather than confirmed hammer prices. Her value case rests primarily on sustained museum and institutional attention rather than on a developed, verifiable secondary market. Current gallery representation should be confirmed directly with greengrassi in London or Kimmerich Gallery in Berlin before any transaction. Provenance and authenticity should be verified through the gallery or the auction house of record given the absence of a catalogue raisonne.