Collapsible Painting Studio
Initiated in 2019, the project emerged from the spatial limitations in Assunta Ruocco’s working environment, where the paintings themselves had to adapt: built to be stored inside one another, each work enfolds and contains the next, forming a nested architecture of memory and material.
Developed through constraint, repetition and accident, Collapsible Painting Studio reflects a practice shaped by shifting conditions of space, care and time. The works are made with acrylics and water-based oils on paper, canvas and digital print, using a restricted palette and translucent layering that allows figures—human and non-human—to emerge from the same liquid substance. Life-sized at varying scale, the paintings are composite, stackable, and open to reconfiguration. Together they attempt to reconstruct or reinhabit a long-lost domestic space within another: a home folded into the studio, carried and reimagined through painterly form.
The project continues Ruocco’s exploration of how intimacy, loss and artistic labour intersect, and how a practice can remain flexible, portable and attentive to the textures of lived experience.