Manuela Metra
Inhabiting Imperfect Beauty
COLOR LISTENS
ABSTRACT AND INFORMAL PAINTING — SURFACES AS SENSORY FIELDS
Every canvas and paper emerges from an act of deep listening: a sound, a light, an emotion before words. Color does not describe; it transmutes substance. Matter layers where control yields to pure presence.
WABI SABI PAINTINGS
SURFACES
Watercolours
DIALOGUES WITH THE EARTH
Clay Sculpture and Everyday Forms — The Intimacy of the Object
Forms born from the interplay of geology, body, and fire. Through the Shibui aesthetic, raw clay and clay sculpture celebrate asymmetry, the crack, and the incomplete, elevating the everyday object into a unique piece to be experienced through the senses.
TEMPORAL ECHO
Fine Art Photography — The Poetics of Shadow
Shutter captures focused on the transience of light, the trace of time, and surface textures. Photography as a visual fragment of impermanence.
PERFORMANCES
& PROJECTS
Making the Invisible Visible is a cycle of performative and transpersonal actions conceived within the project “Beyond Sound: Music Speaks to Us”, promoted by the Fondazione La Società dei Concerti at the Sala Verdi of the Conservatorio di Milano Giuseppe Verdi.
Through action painting and somatic tuning, Manuela Metra’s research acts as a medium between sound vibration—inherently ephemeral and intangible—and the surface of the canvas. The gesture follows the rhythm and the breath of the musicians, embracing the impermanence of sound and translating it into permanent material layers. The action on stage is not a mere pictorial execution; it is a therapeutic device and a deep connection that makes the invisible visible, merging the audience and the performers into a single field of sensory resonance.
Act I — Anna Tifu Tango Quartet
Live artist performance, Conservatorio di Milano, Spring 2026.
Concept: The emotional tension and dynamics of Argentine tango are deconstructed and fixed onto the canvas through pure pigments and saturated fields of color.
Live artist performance, Conservatorio di Milano, Spring 2026.
Concept: The emotional tension and dynamics of Argentine tango are deconstructed and fixed onto the canvas through pure pigments and saturated fields of color.
Act II — Tutto Liszt (Pianist: Vsevolod Zavidov)
Live artist performance, Conservatorio di Milano, Spring 2026.
Concept: The architectural complexity of Liszt’s Transcendental Études is translated into a process of formal abstraction driven by the urgency of the gesture.
Live artist performance, Conservatorio di Milano, Spring 2026.
Concept: The architectural complexity of Liszt’s Transcendental Études is translated into a process of formal abstraction driven by the urgency of the gesture.
Act III — Grand Gala (Ivanna Speranza & Ramin Bahrami)
Live artist performance, Conservatorio di Milano, Spring 2026.
Concept: The pictorial mark tunes into the rigor and sacredness of Johann Sebastian Bach’s arias, celebrating the wound, the void, and the regeneration of matter in dialogue with voice and piano.
Live artist performance, Conservatorio di Milano, Spring 2026.
Concept: The pictorial mark tunes into the rigor and sacredness of Johann Sebastian Bach’s arias, celebrating the wound, the void, and the regeneration of matter in dialogue with voice and piano.
Manuela Metra is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose research approaches art as a device for healing, purification, and somatic tuning. Working across action painting, clay sculpture, photography, and performative actions, she explores the acceptance of impermanence and the sacredness of the void, translating the aesthetic process into a transpersonal path of healing and awareness.
Deeply inspired by Far Eastern poetics and the conceptual rigor of masters such as Park Seo-Bo, Manuela Metra’s practice goes beyond creating contemplative objects. She investigates matter—from pure mineral pigment on canvas to raw clay—as a phenomenological mirror of the self. In her vision, the wound, the crack, and the controlled flaw (in line with Wabi-Sabi and Shibui aesthetics) are not disruptions, but generative epiphanies of form and traces of a shared vulnerability.
Parallel to her solitary studio research, the artist has codified an organic method that merges the meditative practices of Mindfulness (MBSR) and the tactile power of Clay Therapy with the activation of color understood as a true spiritual entity. This approach extends her art-making into relational, institutional, and corporate environments. Within these spaces, her artist-led interventions act as collective actions aimed at healing internal fractures, aligning teams, and rebuilding a deep ecology of thought and practice. She exhibits regularly in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad, working from her Milan Atelier as a center for continuous transformative research.