Miriam Auteri Italy, b. 1999

After attending the Art High School in Militello Val di Catania, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, where she obtained her BA with a thesis on identity and the dissimulation of identity in contemporary self-portraiture, under the supervision of Francesco De Grandi.

She is currently pursuing her MA at the same institution, developing a painting practice focused on the surface, understood as a space of resonance between vision and tactility.

 

Through her painting practice, Auteri investigates the surface as a threshold: a site where vision encounters matter without ever fully exhausting it. Her images do not narrate but rather hold, inviting the viewer to pause and engage with what resists immediate comprehension.

Each fragment becomes a trace of presence—a mark that evokes the body, at times revealing it, at others allowing it only to emerge partially. Her interest lies in the moment when form becomes ambiguous, where painting ceases to describe and begins to question. Within this space of tension, the pictorial gesture becomes an act of precision and attentiveness, a way of navigating the distance between what appears and what remains implicit.

Her process is oriented toward clarity: a search for an internal vibration, for a surface capable of restoring a physical, tactile dimension to vision. While her early work was centered on self-portraiture, her practice has progressively shifted toward a more elusive presence, one that surfaces through material and form. The fragments she selects function as minimal presences through which she reflects on how matter retains its relationship to the body, even in its absence.

Rather than reproducing reality, her paintings seek to condense it. Painting becomes a process of concentration, in which light and color are pushed toward a state of material intensity—as if each detail, within the sheen of the surface, could reveal something both essential and elusive.