Biography

I love nature, and I have chosen to live in a small village surrounded by greenery at the foot of the Apuan Alps, where the shadows of the forest meet the whiteness of the marble quarries.

My work is driven by an irresistible desire to give lightness to what is heavy: to shape hard stone and render it soft, transparent, sensual.
I am a sculptor working in marble. I personally create my works in my studio, using contemporary methods that are rigorously and technically rooted in the manual practice of marble as a material.
I live in the contemporary world, yet I am deeply drawn to the long practice required to create my sculptures, because it exists both outside of time and within the time of history.
I have a profound love for my land among the Apuan Alps, where one can contemplate the marble quarries—a landscape often violated by human intervention. Each time a block of statuary marble arrives in my studio, I cannot help but reflect…
I am a woman living in the present, but sculpture is my timeless being.

EVE BEATRICE TAPONECCO AND HER POETRY

A leaf. Eve. Within the tree from which it comes: life.
In the plasticity of its form lies primordial seduction, the transgression that renders its figure infinitely fertile.
Dead leaves gather together, piled one upon another. The others do not; they continue to dance, suspended in every breath of wind, each one receiving a new lexicon and, with it, a new interpretation that bestows anthropomorphic forms. Beatrice’s leaves, sculpted in the pure white of marble, are all this and much more. They are energy brought to life from matter—apparently cold—that becomes the mother of new creatures: the artist’s offspring, capable of generating warmth and color for our souls. For the artist, there is no separation between art and life.
There is no separation between matter and the shaping movement.
There is suffering and joy in the act of creation. Each time, it is a detachment that gradually takes shape in the stone molded by the hands. It is a part of herself that, from the naked body—stripped of ornament—materializes before our eyes through a defined and recognizable language.
A talent infused with courage, capable of depriving matter of what does not make it a work of art, leaving it not merely a medium, but a vessel for the deepest feeling.
So it is, if you wish—but even more so if you allow the work to appear as the fruit of the primordial sin. As Eve’s fruit. Because for the artist, sculpting is a challenge to the unknown, to what her hands—without a sketch—will know how to shape.
The work is an apple picked from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For art is joy, transgression; and if woman, before disobeying to taste the forbidden fruit, was perfect and immortal, it is only through the awareness of her imperfection that she continues the search for perfection in the forms through which she represents herself—what mind and body can give birth to.
An admirable attempt, perhaps as noble as it is futile, knowing that perfection is inimitable and, as such, becomes a fixed point in infinity, retreating every time one tries to reach it.
From this spasmodic pursuit arises the impulse that gives meaning to the work, releasing an energy that radiates outward, enveloping the observer and drawing them into the very dance the forms create before our eyes.
The advice to the viewer is to let go—overcoming the materiality of the work in order to grasp the sublime of art. To attempt transcendence, so as to gently touch the artist’s soul hidden within what she has created, inspired by what art represents at its most universal: that which leads us to experience and transcend, only to rediscover ourselves in what is most metaphysical, through the act of removing matter from matter.

P. Asti

Beatrice Taponecco was born in Sarzana in 1987. She holds a degree in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara and, since 2024, has been an Honorary Academician of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence. She lives and works in Carrara, in her atelier in Torano.
The poetic vision of Beatrice Taponecco revolves around forms capable of expressing delicacy, strength, and above all the emotions perceived by the artist’s eye and sensitivity through direct observation of nature. Her works achieve the highest level of qualitative and technical refinement, grounded in an aesthetic concept linked to lyrical abstraction—an approach in which she fully recognizes herself and which she continues to develop by translating fragments of nature into marble. The marble sculptures she personally creates through direct carving—overseeing the entire production process—float in space, permeated by light and interpenetrated by its rays. Each work is conceived as a unique piece. Beatrice works directly from the marble block, pursuing a research process that begins with a natural reference and unfolds into exquisitely formal elegance.
She is part of the so-called Apuan–Versilian School of Sculpture, a cultural area between Carrara and Pietrasanta that, from the 1960s onward, has been home to internationally renowned masters dedicated to marble sculpture.
She has received recognition in national and international sculpture competitions, held solo exhibitions, and participated in major group shows. Among her solo exhibitions are A Tu per Tu. Beatrice Taponecco – Piergiorgio Balocchi, curated by Maria Mancini at Palazzo Binelli in Carrara; Sentire la Forma, curated by Laura Barreca, project-room #1 at mudaC | Museo delle Arti Carrara; Venezia Madre, curated by Paolo Asti and Valerio Dehò; and Forme nel Verde in San Quirico d’Orcia, curated by Carlo Pizzichini. Notable group exhibitions include the X Premio Fondazione VAF at MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto and at the Stadtgalerie Kiel. She has won significant awards, including First Prize at the Concorso di Idee for the creation of an artwork for the shortlist of finalists of the Premio Strega (2019); First Prize Corti Milano 2020 for the realization of a monumental artwork for Via Manzoni 48 in Milan; and First Prize in the International Public Competition held within the framework of the CREW project of the Interreg Italy–Slovenia Programme 2021–2027, for the creation of a public sculpture on the Slovenian side of the border. Her artistic presence is further strengthened by participation in international sculpture symposia and the creation of large-scale works for private commissions. Selected among the 15 finalists of the X Premio Fondazione VAF, she exhibited seven marble works at the Stadtgalerie Kiel and at MART in Rovereto. Her works are included in important public and private collections, including the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence. She is represented by HC Gallery, Pietrasanta. Texts on the work of Beatrice Taponecco have been written by Valerio Dehò, Alessandro Chiodo, Francesco Galluzzi, Piergiorgio Balocchi, Massimo Bertozzi, Bruno d’Udine, Angelo Tonelli, Paolo Asti, Luisa Passeggia, Maria Mancini, Laura Barreca, Cinzia Compalati, Serena Redaelli, and Enrico Sartoni.

You can enter the woods – you can get lost in them and they can enlighten you. Modern painting was born in the woods (Barbizon forest or Fontainebleau forest) and then moved to the city (Paris). This is the topographical path from mid-19th century French landscape painting en plein air to Impressionism.
The great dream of mankind has been to penetrate the work of art, to be able to slip into the image and experience it, marked by the search for the healing of this wound of anxiety that has produced more or less functional palliatives throughout the history of art – from the fresco decoration of environments, to the synesthesia of Baroque constructions, to the installations of the second half of the 20th century up to virtual reality and 3D cinema. After all, what is art, compared to reality, if not a palliative?
You cannot enter photographs, just as you cannot enter paintings and you cannot talk to statues (those who have succeeded, like Don Juan Tenorio, usually ended up badly…). However, you can walk in the frescoed rooms or inside art installations.

F. Galluzzi

“Can one experience Eden? Or only the loss of it? It is no coincidence that the myth of the forest has always been a myth of loss, but also of illumination. Beatrice has been questioning the forest for a long time with her visual research, as a place of emotional disorder (in all the good and precious senses of the term), but also as a place where one can succeed in finding oneself. An Eden sought after, transformed, and questioned through the possibilities of matter – in its different declinations. An Eden that can be crossed, photographed, artificially reproduced, to measure its surprises and possibilities. The forest is reproduced, staged, and brought directly into the exhibition space – as if to demonstrate that its meanings are multipliable, never reducible. After all, Beatrice is a woman, that is to say, as Franz Wedekind wrote, a soul that in Eden wipes the sleep from its eyes.”

(from the introduction to the exhibition by F. Galluzzi)

The work on marble that is focused on leaves reveals a shared appreciation of the relationship between time and nature. The main feature continues to be the cooperation between cohesive entities that seem to belong to different orders of magnitude, but masquerade to be identical. Art is a part of nature and vice versa. It can capture and pass on positive memories of an inspiration that must not be forgotten. The artist delicately reworks the hardness of the material, searching for its ultimate nature. One after the other, the leaves reveal the whiteness of an ethereal material. It is a form that is returned, the creation recreates the existing, even in the variation of materials. Beatrice preserves the sense of an authentic revelation. Art, we repeat, is not in competition with nature because it becomes a component of it, it acts on memory linked to archetypes, to something we cannot do without, even if the speed of existence today does not allow us to take part in it. The time of sculpture regains life, becomes genesis in these precious and poetic works, as does the wonder of simplicity.

Valerio Dehò

When a leaf sprouts, it is as if nothing happens: one waits, like insects, for the flowers to bloom, for the fruit to ripen.
It is rather when a leaf dies that complicated and worrying thoughts creep into everyone’s thoughts.
A leaf that is born has no history, a leaf that dies is an accomplished experience and has shaped its own destiny.
Exactly like the leaves that Beatrice Taponecco has been sculpting for some time.
What we have here is a large, soft, smooth leaf, free of veins, floating in the air, as if folded in on itself, but without curling up, which is supported in its upward thrust by the impetuous development of a wave, while at the other end it folds its wings, while the movement is completely reabsorbed by a brief suction of the form, which forces the foam to become marble again.
A shape from which emanates an almost impalpable yet persistent luminosity, nourished by the interweaving of a silk-thin warp with a soft and vaporous weft, which does not intend to renounce its consistency, like a powder even when it is forced to incinerate in the most hidden folds, where the darkest shadows are repressed.
The simple silhouette, as always the forms of nature, of the leaf nevertheless remains enclosed in a contour line, fluid and uninterrupted, even at the tips, which round off and curve with rhythm and harmony, in a continuous articulation of open surfaces, which develop almost without edges, as the corners have been smoothed, softened or rounded off altogether.
Hidden in this development is an ancient wisdom, the broad way of the sculptural art, the ability to create, even in hard material, the plastic development of a lightness without rigidity, suited to a form so alive that it does not rest in its skin, smoothed by the wind, consumed by water, calcined by the sun, like a cuttlefish bone.
One thus discovers an almost animal body, in this form that should be a vegetable form. A form in which a sense of stillness is established, but not quite of serenity, as there is still an atmosphere of suspension that one can feel evaporating, as if in eager anticipation.
Perhaps of another ‘blizzard hitting the hard leaves of the magnolia’.

Massimo Bertozzi

Selected Exhibition List

Florence, Accademia delle Arti del Disegno – Le Vie della Forma, group exhibition, December 2025.
Rovereto, MART – X Premio Fondazione VAF, group exhibition, September 2024–February 2025.
Kiel, Stadtgalerie – X Premio Fondazione VAF, group exhibition, June–September 2024.
Carrara, mudaC Museo delle Arti Carrara – Sentire la Forma, solo exhibition, curated by Laura Barreca), December 2023–February 2024.
Carrara, Palazzo Binelli – A Tu per Tu, solo exhibition with PG Balocchi, curated by Maria Mancini, July–August 2023.
San Quirico d’Orcia, Siena – Horti Pacis, 51st Forme nel Verde international sculpture exhibition curated by Carlo Pizzichini, July–November 2022.
Venice, Ca’ Cappello Memo – Venezia Madre, group exhibition, curated by Paolo Asti and Valerio Dehò, 2022.
Carrara, Galleria Duomo – Chiari del Bosco, solo exhibition, curated by Francesco Galluzzi, December 2018–February 2019.
San Quirico d’Orcia, Siena – Pause, between Chaos and Harmony, 48th Forme nel Verde international sculpture exhibition, curated by Gaia Pasi, in collaboration with Eternity by Maurizio Cattelan, July–September 2018.

Major Awards

First Prize, International Public Competition (CREW – Crossroads of Visions, Interreg VI-A Italy–Slovenia 2021–2027), for a public sculpture on the Slovenian side of the border.
First Prize, Corti Milano 2020, promoted by Cittamoderna B.I. and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, for the realization of a marble artwork installed in Corte Manzoni, Milan (2020).
First Prize, Premio Strega 73rd edition, Rome — idea competition for an artwork recognized as an identifier for the finalist shortlist (2019).
First Prize, International Sculpture Routes – 4th edition, for a monumental sculpture for San Jacopo Hospital in Pistoia (2019–2020).

Monumental Works

Nova Gorica, Slovenia – Sconfinando, Calacatta marble, 106 in.
San Benedetto del Tronto – Una Foglia è il divino nell’universo, Roman travertine, 118 in (MAM – Museo d’Arte sul Mare).
La Spezia (private collection) – Foglia, White Carrara marble, 102 in.
Cavriglia, Borgo di Castelnuovo d’Avane – Una Foglia, Eva. From the Tree That Gives Life, Rapolano travertine, 118 in.
Milan, Corte Manzoni – Foglia, White Carrara marble, 98 in.
Carrara, Ancient “Littorio” Staircase – Fonte nel Bosco, marble, bronze, iron, 94 in.
Udine, Danieli & C. collection – Rigenerazione, Carnic peach-flower marble, 67 in.

International Sculpture Symposia

San Benedetto del Tronto, 27th Scultura Viva International Symposium of Sculpture (2023).
Arezzo, 3rd Pietra Sublime International Sculpture Symposium (2022).
Udine, 23rd Scultura su Pietre del Friuli Venezia Giulia International Sculpture Symposium (2019).

Public Collections

Her works are included in major public collections, including:

Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence.
MAM – Museo d’Arte sul Mare, San Benedetto del Tronto.
Mo.C.A. – Contemporary Art Museum, Montecatini.
BPER Banca, Rome.
Danieli S.p.A., Buttrio – Udine.

Selected Bibliography

Publication: Catalogue no. 124, Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, exhibition Le Vie della Forma – 27 Sculptors of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, curated by E. Sartoni, pp. 17–20, 66–67. Edizioni Polistampa, Florence, 2025. ISBN 9788859625278.
Journal article: The Artbook Magazine, issue no. 21, Contemporary Eyes, in-depth feature on Beatrice Taponecco, curated by B. Bortoluzzi, pp. 28–30. The Teelent Art Company, L. Puglisi Edizioni, Varese, September 2025.
Book chapter: C. Salerno, Il Mondo delle Donne. Arte, Artigianato, Storia e Cultura, pp. 174–183. Produced by Women in Action Worldwide, Altra Economia soc. coop. Edizioni, Milan, 2025. ISBN 9788865165980.
International publication: Exhibition catalogue X Premio Fondazione VAF 2024, Kiel 2024 – MART Rovereto 2025, Beatrice Taponecco, curated by S. Redaelli, pp. 225–237. Manfredi Edizioni, May 2024. ISBN 9791280049766.
Journal article: Panorama, no. 27, Italian Art – The 13 Young Finalists of the Premio VAF, curated by V. Sgarbi, pp. 66–69, 26 June 2024. ISBN 977055310903142427.
Monograph: Solo exhibition catalogue Beatrice Taponecco. Sentire la Forma, curated by L. Veschi. Texts by L. Barreca and C. Compalati. GD Edizioni, Sarzana, January 2024. ISBN 9791280745965.
Publication: Exhibition catalogue A Tu per Tu – Pier Giorgio Balocchi | Beatrice Taponecco. Texts by M. Mancini, M. Bertozzi, L. Passeggia, pp. 1–44. GD Edizioni, Sarzana, July 2023. ISBN 9791280745798.
Publication: Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Aruntica di Carrara, vol. XXIX, year 2023, curated by C. Andrei. Beatrice Taponecco in Aruntica, texts by P.G. Balocchi and M. Bertozzi, pp. 11–20. Società Editrice Apuana, November 2024.
Book chapter: A. Chiodo, Scritti sull’arte e sulla letteratura, vol. I, Pondera Verborum Art Project. Amazon Italia Logistica S.r.l., Torrazza Piemonte (TO), 2022. ISBN 9798367448788.
Publication: Exhibition catalogue Horti Pacis, Forme nel Verde 2022, San Quirico d’Orcia, curated by C. Pizzichini, p. 57. Printed by Pixartprinting S.p.A., Quarto d’Altino (VE), July 2022. ISBN 9788894338768.
Publication: Exhibition catalogue Premio Combat Prize 2020, p. 137. Sillabe Edizioni, Livorno, October 2020. ISBN 9788833402185.
Publication: Exhibition catalogue Pause tra Caos e Armonia, Forme nel Verde 2018, San Quirico d’Orcia, curated by G. Pasi, pp. 27, 30. Edizioni Il Leccio, October 2018.

Appointments and Collaborations

Organizing Committee Collaboration: Forme nel Verde 2022 – Horti Pacis, curated by Carlo Pizzichini.

Beatrice Taponecco collaborates with some of the most prestigious workshops in Carrara, including SGF Sculpture & Design and the Cooperativa Scultori di Carrara. She currently produces her works at Bedrock Atelier, located in the heart of the quarries.
She is represented by HC Gallery in Pietrasanta.