The house/studio of artist Mirella Mibelli (1937 – 2015), now home to the Archive of the same name that promotes and enhances her work, is located in the narrow alleys of the historic center of Pirri, in an old Campidanese two-level home, distinguished in the interior elevation by large stone cantone arches that open onto the small lemon garden of the courtyard (sa lolla).
Mirella Mibelli’s house/studio is still preserved in its integrity as a space of private life and work, with the furniture and objects of daily use along with the filing cabinets, easels, palettes, art books, photographs, notepads and sketches. On the walls are some of her most cherished works.
Born in Olbia in 1937, Mirella Mibelli graduated from the Zileri Art Institute in Rome, where she attended Toti Scialoja’s painting classes. In 1958 she landed in Salzburg at the Sommerakademie fur Bildende Kunst, also called the School of Seeing, a summer academy founded in 1953 by Oskar Kokoschka. His experience with the Austrian master consolidated his reputation as a watercolorist who identified nudes, landscapes and still lifes, particularly floral ones, as his favorite subjects, a selection of which will be exhibited at the opening of his home/studio to the public. Between the early 1980s until the late 1990s, Mibelli instead deepened her study and practice of engraving techniques: woodcut, intaglio, lithography and silkscreen printing; some original matrixes of prints can still be seen in her home/studio. From 1968 to 1996 Mirella Mibelli taught Pictorial Disciplines at the Liceo Artistico Statale “Foiso Fois” in Cagliari, contributing to the training of new generations of women artists.
