Arielle Aufkin is an artist who turned to painting in 2025, after working for many years as a telecommunications technician. That same year, an autoimmune disease and the intense pain it caused profoundly disrupted her daily life, leading her to painting almost out of necessity, initially as a spontaneous form of art therapy.
What began as a personal refuge soon became a true artistic language through which she explores themes such as metamorphosis, rebirth, and society. Her work has been presented in France, Miami, Milan, and Zurich. Through painting, Arielle creates a visual universe where personal experience and collective transformations meet, giving shape to an artistic inquiry that is constantly evolving.
In Arielle’s work, metamorphosis unfolds within a world marked by continuous transformation: nature changes, landscapes disappear, cities expand and deteriorate, and societies redefine themselves. The individual, too, is part of this movement. Axis Mundi emerges precisely at the point where what happens within us meets what transforms around us, exploring the possibility of finding a sense of direction amid instability. In this space of transition, the artist observes what remains and what changes, questioning whether it is possible to move through transformation without losing one’s centre.
Memory becomes a space of passage, not an immobile place in which to preserve what has been, but a point from which what we have experienced can be transformed into a force capable of lifting us. Between nature, the body, landscape, and architecture, the works reflect a reality suspended between transformation and disappearance, between an almost dystopian dimension and the possibility of a new form. The images thus become spaces where past and future overlap, allowing new possibilities to emerge for understanding what surrounds us and who we are.
Arielle creates that precise point where something transforms. Where matter becomes memory. Where fragility becomes movement. Where what once seemed broken can become a passage. She does not seek to erase its traces, but to transform them. Her painting therefore moves between what is visible and what remains implicit, giving form to a process in which transformation does not necessarily mean loss, but can become the beginning of a new possibility.
Axis Mundi does not propose an escape from chaos, nor a return to a lost equilibrium, but the discovery of what we can become. It is that inner axis where memory, the body, and the desire to rise meet; the point where what we have experienced, without being erased, can become the material from which we build our future. The exhibition thus invites us to see transformation not as a definitive rupture, but as a space through which we can continue to move, rebuild, and find a new direction.
Exhibition Title: Axis Mundi
Opening: Friday, October 23, 2026, at 6:00 PM
When: October 23 – 29, 2026
Where: Medina Art Gallery, Via Merulana 220, Rome
Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10 AM–1 PM / 3–7 PM; Saturday and Sunday by appointment
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