Pseudonym used by a young Neapolitan artist, born in 1990, Theo Drebbel began her artistic career in 2007 with photography. Her language soon evolved towards other expressive media, the miniature in particular, akin to the Neapolitan tradition of models for nativity scenes, leading her to study the virtues e peculiarities of the scale model. She then started focusing on naturalist collections, collecting objects which in 2012 came together in a series of micro-compositions of vegetable matter, sealed in glass cases, which make up the basis of her later research and her language.
Morphology is her obsession. Giving shape to memory, be it of real or imaginary places or situations: this is the theme of her new work, begun in 2013. Her dioramas are landscapes of memory and her attempts to beat it, like a game of chess with the past; they are reminding mechanisms in reverse, ones in which the aim in not to bring memories back to mind, but ultimately to let them sink away.
Since 2016 he is represented by Viasaterna Gallery (Mi, IT)
In 2017 she presented a new work called Doppelgänger, based on the phylosophical concept of the double, more precisely the fleeting perception that sometimes one has in grasping his own image passing by; a tangible “spirit double”, having the same memories and feelings as the person to whom the counterpart belongs. In taking up this theme, the diorama elects as a privileged subject of his own research: Time, once again unbearable as the memory one, but equally metaphysical if conceived as a background of the encounter with the identical, sign of an omen.
In 2018 two new works have begun, both in progress, one called ‘The Procession’ and the other ‘The Nature Altars’.