Maria Valentina Palmisano

Maria Valentina Palmisano (Bologna, 1994) is a PhD candidate in Arts, History, Society at the University of Bologna. She conducts research in the visual arts. Her doctoral project examines aniconic art connected to spiritual themes, specifically the recent rediscovery of the Transcendental Painting Group in America. She adopts a comparative approach between the group's original artworks, other chronologically and formally similar cases identified in other countries, and contemporary cases. The aim is to contribute to the debate on contemporary art and the expression of spirituality.
Before her doctorate, she specialized in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. She completed a thesis on the relationship between contemporary art and the theme of the afterlife. This thesis resulted in the publication of an essay on the same topic: The Afterlife is a narrow Corner. Beyond Death in Contemporary Art (Pendragon, 2022) which contributed to the development of her current research perspective. Go to the Curriculum vitae