Laura Bottaro paints like someone who listens closely—to silence, to emotion, to the deep current running under ordinary experience. Born in Vicenza in 1958, she came of age in Italy’s postwar artistic atmosphere, where questions of identity and meaning were often answered with abstraction, gesture, and emotion. Bottaro studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, graduating in 1986 under the guidance of Emilio Vedova, one of Italy’s most restless painters. Her thesis on Wols—a German artist whose work skirted between surrealism and abstract expressionism—gives a clue to where her compass points: toward chaos, delicacy, and the poetry of feeling.
What makes Bottaro’s work stand out is that she doesn’t try to tame that chaos. She doesn’t impose form. She lets it drift, surge, pull back—just like the sea in her piece from the “Mother Water” cycle. That painting, shown here, captures a seascape that isn’t fixed in time or space. There are waves, yes. There is water. But more than that, there’s movement. The canvas hums with soft force, as if nature is not being depicted but remembered. The blues are cool and rich. The brushwork glides. There’s no need for detail. The emotion carries it.
That approach—deliberate, introspective, and often close to the edge of abstraction—has marked her path from the beginning. Bottaro started showing her work in Germany, where she lived for long periods. Her first exhibition in Berlin opened on November 2, 1989, a day before the Berlin Wall began to fall. History, presence, and transition have shadowed her work ever since. She made her debut in Italy in 1992 at Galleria Sintesi in Treviso, and prior to that, she explored sculpture for a 1987 cultural event in Milan.
Bottaro paints landscapes and female nudes, though the label feels a little too stiff for what she actually does. These aren’t traditional portraits or settings. They’re more like emotional atmospheres. In her words, her painting is “sensitive and intense emotional writing.” The subjects are jumping-off points—vehicles for an interior search. Often, her pieces push toward abstraction, but there’s still a trace of something familiar: the line of a hip, the slope of a shore, the glow of reflected light.
She calls painting a “method of introspection,” a way to know herself and understand the world. That clarity shows in the rhythm of her work. Every painting seems to come from a place of quiet reflection, yet the result is not static. Even when she’s painting something as fluid as water, the effect feels rooted, almost meditative. She follows cycles in her work, but not in the usual sense. “Cycles that repeat themselves without repeating themselves,” she says. Each new cycle is a continuation, not a conclusion.
That idea fits with the feel of the “Mother Water” series. Water is a source, a mirror, a symbol of emotion and life. In Bottaro’s hands, it becomes something more—a record of inner tides. The piece shown here (oil on canvas, 157 x 62 cm) uses large horizontal space to create a sense of expanse and breath. The motion within the painting is gentle but steady. You can feel the pull of currents, the echo of waves. The paint itself seems to drift, as if the sea was painted not from sight but from sensation.
She’s not trying to impress or shout. There’s no visual spectacle. Instead, there’s stillness. And in that stillness, there’s power.
Laura Bottaro’s career has been shaped less by trends and more by observation—observation of the mind, of memory, of the everyday. She doesn’t paint for decoration. She paints for connection, to offer something honest and stripped-down in a noisy world. Her work isn’t about answers; it’s about the process of asking.
There’s no sense of finality in her art, only process. Her work moves like the sea—shifting, repeating, returning to the same places but always a little different. Each painting becomes part of a quiet dialogue with the self and with the world.
Bottaro once said that her work is an invitation for people to rediscover themselves. That invitation still stands, open and patient, like a calm sea waiting for someone to wade in.
