SYMBIONTS - Yvonne Ekman

SYMBIONTS

Solo Exhibition by Yvonne Ekman

Curated by Giulia Del Papa

AAIE Center for Contemporary Art, Via Sermide 7, Rome

Opening: 19 December 2025, 6:00 PM

19 December 2025 – 24 January 2026

Free admission

Tuesday–Saturday, 2:00–6:00 PM

www.aaie.art

info@aaie.art

 

AAIE Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to invite you on Friday, 19 December 2025 at 6:00 PM to the solo exhibition of Yvonne Ekman entitled Symbionts, curated by Giulia Del Papa and hosted in the gallery’s space in Rome.

 

The exhibition offers an occasion to present the most recent phase of the Anglo-Swedish artist’s research—who has lived and worked in Italy for many years—while also retracing several fundamental stages of her artistic production.

 

Symbionts are organisms that live in a condition of obligatory coexistence, often deriving mutual benefit from their relationship. Symbionts are, in fact, the two organisms that form the structure of lichens, the starting point of Ekman’s latest body of work.

 

In a society that seems to have forgotten the world that hosts it, her attention turns to this primordial vegetal species, a protagonist of the earliest phases of biodiversity’s development and still today one of the most widespread organisms on the planet, thanks to its capacity to survive in inhospitable environments.

 

To lichens, the artist has dedicated a series of works in which geometric forms combine in structures that appear unstable—somewhere between ancient ruins, constructions in precarious balance, and accumulations of elements seemingly scattered at random. On these conglomerates cling and persist the precursors of our biological life, inhabiting and animating those spaces that human neglect abandons to inevitable decay.

 

Lichens represents the most recent chronological phase of a broader reflection on society, its contradictions and distortions, which Ekman has pursued for years with a refined gaze and subtle irony. This irony is indeed the key to interpreting her entire oeuvre: visual and semantic play reveals the paradoxes on which society has constructed its own existence, at times bringing forth a constant critique of those who contribute to the depletion of environmental and human resources.

 

In The World Above and the World Below, for instance, the artist shows us fruits and underground vegetables that humans attempt to force into geometric molds to satisfy consumerist logic. It is important to underline, however, that her critical and denunciatory intent always transforms into a perspective of hope, where the primary symbols of culture—Books—become a beacon of light guiding humankind.

 

The geometric forms, freely assembled on the wall or on panels to create figures in states of dissolution, as in the triptych The Rose, The Leaf and The Water, are a constant in Ekman’s work. Coming from the world of classical music, the artist has found in geometric solids the expression closest to her way of being and thinking—where those combinations of irregular prisms seem to echo, ideally, the structural developments of musical compositions.

 

Symbionts thus represents a journey backwards through the artist’s exploration of ceramic language, giving voice and form to an ironic and allusive critique of society and its dominant behaviours, while simultaneously valuing small beings and organisms which, through constant and silent labour, stand as essential outposts of vital resistance.

 

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

Yvonne Ekman, of Anglo-Swedish origin, studied in England and graduated in violin from the Royal College of Music in London. After winning a scholarship, she moved to Rome, where she completed her musical studies and embarked on a career that led her to perform internationally, concluding after many years as Professor of Violin at the Conservatorio S. Cecilia in Rome.

 

Attracted by the expressive potential of clay, she dedicated herself in parallel to sculpture, seeking pathways capable of giving concrete form and volume to her thinking. She refined her practice in Italy, France, and England, developing an original style that she has integrated with civic engagement, using her art to draw attention to socially relevant issues.

 

Her solo exhibitions include: Atelier Montez, Rome (2022); Polifonia Sequence, Galleria Frammenti d’Arte, Rome (2018); L’Armonia del Tutto, Mini Galleria, Assisi (2016); Galleria Opera Unica, Rome (2012); Galleria/Libreria Koob, Rome (2010); Sala della Pesa, ex Mattatoio, Rome (2010); Kyo Art Gallery (2008); Langericht Köln, Germany (2006); Museo dell’Architettura, Fermignano (2005).

 

Her works are held in multiple public collections, including: Piazza Dante, 4° Canto Paradiso – Rome; Museo della Ceramica – Grottaglie; Terra Crea, Museo di Scultura Ceramica – Mantua; Insieme, Fondazione Pistoletto, Cittadellarte – Biella; MuBAQ, Children’s Museum – L’Aquila; MAAM – Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere, Metropoliz – Rome; La Pesca nell’Arte, Convento della Maddalena – Castel di Sangro; LandArt al Furlo – Fossombrone; Museo della Ceramica Artistica Contemporanea – Castelli; Il Muro, Fiumara d’Arte – Mistretta (ME); Museum of Fine Arts – Taipei (Taiwan); Arte sui Muri, Galleria d’Arte Genova Pegli.