ANA LUPAS

The exhibition title, deliberately left in Italian, plays on a crucial linguistic specificity and a double semantic register. The term armatura simultaneously evokes two key notions in Lupas’s practice: the load-bearing structure—an internal, skeletal support, corresponding to the English armature—and the protective shell, or armour, that shields from external threat.

The entire exhibition revolves around this necessity to support and protect what is vulnerable. Whether addressing collective memory or individual identity, Ana Lupas responds to the threat of erasure with solid, enduring devices of protection.

This defensive stance materialises, on the one hand, in monumental metal works, which Lupas uses to encapsulate and sustain organic, rural materials. Here, armatura functions as a structural framework capable of preserving the ephemeral and transforming fragile, perishable tradition into an enduring monument. Similarly, in series such as Self-Portrait, by graphically intervening on her own features and disrupting mechanical repetition, Lupas erects a barrier against standardization. Identity is not offered as a commodified, uniform image; rather, it appears armored by the graphic mark—a public image that, even as it multiplies, defends the irreducibility of the private self through variation and manipulation.

Armature thus unfolds as a journey through the strategies of resistance concentrated in Ana Lupas’s practice, celebrating art’s capacity to become shelter, armour, and structural support—an armature through which to survive history.