Palm Sunday. 2001. Digital print mounted on forex, 90 x 90 cm.
Mirco Andrea Carlesso (born 1965) and Isolde Döbele-Carlesso (born 1961) have worked together since 1999, under the name Carlesso & Carlesso. Mirco Andrea studied painting with Emilio Vedova at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. After studying art history and history in Heidelberg and Berlin, Isolde obtained a doctorate in history from the University of Stuttgart.
Since they started living together in 1991, they have been publishing books and texts and designing multiples. But only in the course of time, did it become clear to them that art and life cannot be separated in their relationship. Thus they decided to present themselves as a pair of artists.
This decision coincided with the destruction of a large portion of Andrea’s painting works. He transformed his graphic work, produced since 1991, into sausages by making paper maché from his drawings and filling this into natural intestines. They took up the idea of transmutation and destruction in other activities such as planting books they had edited as well as making terracottas from the clay-containing soil in their garden.
Their joint work functions in the form of a company which makes it possible to divide tasks and thus undertake different types of projects at the same time. Carlesso & Carlesso discuss their projects together, along with the possibilities of realizing them. They believe in the democracy of dialogue, or better said, in the dictatorship of rhetoric. This means that the ideas which are most convincingly defended are carried out. They consider it important to discuss and reflect on their work, and to constantly question what it is they are doing, because the contradiction of the artist in respect of his work is: He can go ahead with it or leave it be. The issue here is the feeling of inner urgency.
Carlesso 