After Venice and Milan, it arrives in Serbia on 2 December. Carla Tolomeo – known to many as the “lady of the chairs” and currently featured in the successful Milan exhibition FORMAE at Gaggenau, together with Fulvio Morella and Franco Mazzucchelli – is now at the centre of an important international acquisition. On 2 December, her Albero della Vita (Tree of Life), originally conceived for the Museo Mocenigo in Venice on the occasion of the 2024 Biennale, will enter the permanent collection of the Madlena Art Palace in Belgrade. At a time when Serbia and its capital are marked by injustice, tensions and social unrest that risk overshadowing their beauty, the arrival of the work stands as a concrete sign of dialogue between peoples and generations, with and through beauty.
Formae (Milan) Fulvio Morella (stars) and Carla Tolomeo. ©Gaggenau, Cramum
The Tree, constructed entirely by Carla Tolomeo in her studio with the collaboration of her long-standing assistants, is a monumental organism composed of 1,225 individually handmade pieces. The work is dedicated to Bahamut from Jorge Luis Borges’s Manual of Fantastic Zoology, the great poet who was a friend of the artist for many years. Fruits hang from its branches; across its surfaces turtles climb, parrots land, tropical flowers bloom and snakes hide, while fish dart among its roots: a lush, almost mythical flora and fauna that gives shape to an allegory of origin, duration and the continual renewal of life.
Tolomeo interprets this universe with a joyful poetry intertwined with a deep sensitivity to the natural cycle, bringing together in the Albero della Vita literary imagination, material richness and the symbolism of transformation.
The work is enriched by fabrics from Bevilacqua, Fortuny, Cotonificio Veneziano and Pontoglio, institutions that have long supported the artist’s practice. Tolomeo chose Italian textiles in place of the paints she once used: lampas, silks, jacquards, linens and brocades with silk and gold trimmings become her three-dimensional palette. The same materials also embellish the installations in the theatre of the Madlena Palace, underscoring her deep bond with great Italian craftsmanship and with an idea of cultivated luxury, made of expertise and skilled hands rather than ostentation.
The creation of the work’s bestiary has been enhanced by Venini, which has produced in Murano glass the animals conceived by the artist, following her drawings closely. The transparency of the glass converses with the softness of the fabrics, making the Tree a complex visual device in which light, matter and form all participate in the same narrative.
Since 1997, Carla Tolomeo has been making art through textiles, an almost unique case on the international scene. She has collaborated with major maisons such as Hermès and Blumarine, created suites for the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris and has been working for years with Formitalia and Superstudio. Her works are held in museums and galleries in Italy and abroad (Contini, Tornabuoni, Artion, Galleria del Paseo, Coffa) and have been shown at the Sheremetev Museum in St Petersburg, the Musée Hermès, the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo in Brazil, the Barracca Foundation in Miami and, now, in Belgrade, where the Albero becomes one of the symbolic focal points of the collection, thanks also to the vision of the lady of the house, Madlena Zepter.
Carla Tolomeo Albero della Vita
This Serbian milestone comes at a particularly happy moment in the artist’s career: on the one hand, strong visibility in Italy, as testified by her presence in FORMAE in Milan; on the other, the consolidation of an international community of collectors and patrons who recognize in Tolomeo’s work a natural bridge between art, design and high-end craftsmanship.
The Albero della Vita is also a manifesto of transformation and environmental sustainability. Tolomeo’s entire journey is rooted in the idea of seeing in continuous change – from residue to beauty, from nothingness to art – the deepest meaning of creativity. It is an ecological and cultural message at the same time: if we do not learn to transform what is left over, the world will end up submerged by the waste of so-called civilisation.
In this perspective, the Tree becomes a metaphor for an existence in constant evolution: a world that regenerates, changes and endures in a balance that must always be rebuilt between nature and art. That it should be the “lady of the chairs” herself – with her baroque, ironic and profoundly human forms – to carry this message from Milan to Belgrade is perhaps the most convincing sign that beauty can still become a common language, against every social fracture.
