Everything she does is so beautiful,” she says of the 64-year-old Milan-based artist whose paintings on paper and canvas blur the boundaries between the work and the space around it. “Nathalie just came up with the designs and I loved them.
BORIS GRAFFITI BAY AREA FREE
Napoleone gave du Pasquier creative free rein. “I didn’t know what I wanted her to do, but I just called her gallery and said I would like to do a project with Nathalie in my house.” Her approach to art has long been admired by Napoleone, who purchased one of her tall, ceramic, totem-like sculptures just before embarking on this collaboration. In The Midnight Hour, 2016, by Silke Otto Knapp (on wall) and First Spaceship on Venus (Soft Rocket in Denim), 2018, by Sylvie Fleury (on floor) © Michael Sinclairĭu Pasquier has contributed to this balance with four interventions to the fabric of the house. On the wall hangs Nativity, 2007, by Andrea Büttner © Michael Sinclair The study contains an Amici sofa by Gaetano Pesce, and Totem, 2018, by Nathalie du Pasquier. “I want to honour my most beloved pieces while keeping the balance of a home.”Ī wall cabinet by Nathalie du Pasquier in the master bedroom © Michael Sinclair “My intention was really to accommodate the art as if it’s another one of my children,” smiles Napoleone. The all‑white walls, grey stone and wooden floors, and steel‑framed glass partitions create an elegant, thoughtful backdrop to the house’s main focus: the vibrant art and design. They moved into the space – from an apartment across the road – this time last year, following a three-year renovation undertaken by London’s Quinn Architects and Milan’s Studio Monzini & Raboni. Her two sons are both currently studying overseas at NYU. Her daughter Letizia, who has Down’s syndrome, is an advocate for diversity and inclusivity, represented by Zebedee talent agency. “Here” is a seven-storey Victorian townhouse that Napoleone shares with her husband Gregorio – a founding partner of private equity firm Stirling Square Capital Partners – and their three children. So I said to myself, ‘I’m going to create a choir of female voices who have been silenced throughout art history.’ That was the start of the journey, and here I am.” And yet I was very much aware of women not being represented in galleries. There was a lot going on, especially with women artists like Cindy Sherman they were developing incredible work and creating new languages.
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“The mid-’90s in New York City were really quite magical for contemporary art. “It was something that came to me very naturally,” she says of the female focus. “It’s difficult to stop.” The daughter of a wealthy Italian industrialist – whose company produced plastic resins – to date she has amassed around 450 works. “It’s a machine that goes on and on and on,” she says. Napoleone started her collection more than 20 years ago, after studying a master’s degree in art-gallery administration at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
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Transposed Lime Butterfly, 2019, by Anthea Hamilton © Michael Sinclair “It’s just perfect here,” says Napoleone of the feminist artwork that fills the entire wall.Īrtwork in Napoleone’s study includes Neobros, 1998, by Margherita Manzelli © Michael Sinclair “I don’t like artists – or people, for that matter – who take themselves too seriously.” Perched upon her voluptuous living-room sofa (a 1970 design by Mario Marenco that was reissued by Arflex in 2018), her long-limbed frame is backlit by an elegantly oversized Victorian bay window and overshadowed by a neon explosion of a painting titled Birth of the Universe – its crude, graffiti-like depictions of male and female genitalia conceived by 79-year-old New York artist Judith Bernstein. “In art, but also in design, I like a sense of humour – and playfulness,” says Lombardy-born Napoleone, with an Italian lilt. As a collector, she only buys the work of women, and has even gone so far as to commission Nathalie du Pasquier, founding member of the ’80s-defining Memphis Group, to create four bespoke pieces for her home. They hint at her love of dressing up and entertaining, and her eclectic taste in art and design. But the freshly unboxed ones with skyscraper platform heels that I spy in her bathroom. Not so much the low-key slip-ons she is wearing – with patterned palazzo trousers, a hoodie and a baseball cap – when she shows me around her Kensington home.
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Valeria Napoleone’s gold Prada shoes say a lot.