EX - Illustri x Elena Xausa

“EX - Illustri x Elena Xausa”, is the exhibition at the heart of a creative workshop that will involve lovers of illustration in the Bank's Vicenza museum venue over a period of five months. The initiative is promoted and curated by Intesa Sanpaolo and Associazione Illustri, which together have been organizing the biennial international event “Illustri Festival” since 2015, when the Bank started to host the “Illustrissimo section at Palazzo Leoni Montanari, with famous names such as Pablo Lobato, Noma Bar, Malika Favre and Christoph Niemann. With the exhibition dedicated to Elena Xausa, the Vicenza museum kicks off an annual appointment dedicated to international contemporary illustration.

The protagonist of the “EX - Illustri x Elena Xausa” exhibition project, with the patronage of the Municipality of Vicenza, Elena Xausa (1984-2022), an internationally acclaimed Italian illustrator and artist who recently passed away. The title EX originates from the way she signed her works, but also from the etymological meaning of the word:  EX with the meaning of “motion to a place”, as a starting point and as a cause. This project is conceived not only as a tribute to the artist and her career, but also as a moving construction site, drawing inspiration from Xausa's energy to engage a broad creative community.

Elena Xausa lived in Venice, Berlin, Milan and New York, working for international newspapers and magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Le Monde, Les Echos, Monocle, Vogue, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Icon Design and leading brands like Apple, Nike, Fendi and many more. Her personal artistic research led her to explore the infinite possibilities of drawing and to develop her work also in the third dimension, with the creation of site-specific installations, design objects and clothes.

200 of the artist's works are on display: the first room “EXperimenti”, the most intimate in Elena Xausa's creative journey, is entirely dedicated to the backstage aspects of her work and her personal research: a significant part of her sketchbooks, on public display for the first time, as well as her ceramics and sculptures.

The “EXpo” section is dedicated to her artistic production from 2009 to 2019, when Elena Xausa travelled outside abroad, first to Europe and then to New York, where she settled for a few years. Libraries, cafés, shared studios, trains and steamships, aeroplanes and cars, friends' living rooms, flower-filled meadows, Norwegian cliffs and American glades are just some of the settings in which her illustrations were created. “EXpo” continues with the most important collaborations and publications of these ten years of Elena's career, from the best-known international newspapers to the trendiest companies on the European and international scene.

“EXnovo” is the space dedicated to showing how Elena Xausa's energy continues its journey thanks to the works of 100 illustrators, designers and artists called upon to narrate the artist's creativity in the 100 previously unseen tributes: prints, originals, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, installations, videos and other works, which will be available to raise funds for AIRC - the Italian Association for Cancer Research. The artists include Matteo Cibic, Ale Giorgini, Luca Zamoc, Guido Scarabottolo, Giorgia Lupi, Mauro Gatti, Koes, Manuele Fior, Basik, Sarah Mazzetti, Emiliano Ponzi, Lorenzo Fonda, Lavinia Xausa, Luca Font, Massimo Giacon and Riccardo Guasco.

The exhibition ends with "EXcursus", a space where every visitor can experience the most intimate and profound sense of the creative spark, pausing and using space and time to transfer the inspiration drawn from the exhibition onto paper. The venue will be enhanced by a mural by Luca Zamoc, a street-artist who will be creating his work dedicated to Elena between the 12th and 14th of April.

"EXtra", a rich programme of creative days, with workshops, talks, meetings and experiences related to the world of illustration and more, will run throughout the exhibition.