About
Jenna Basso Pietrobon is a multidisciplinary artist working between painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and light. Raised in Canada within a family of Italian ceramicists and makers, her practice is deeply informed by the material histories and cultural landscapes of the Veneto region in northern Italy, where her grandparents originated from the towns of Nove di Bassano, Breganze, and Castelfranco Veneto. She currently lives and works between Paris and Veneto.
Working across clay, oil paint, plaster, textile, sound, found industrial forms, and architectural references, Basso Pietrobon investigates themes of memory, inheritance, labor, transformation, and psychological space. Her works often exist in unstable states between construction and erosion, beauty and collapse, object and atmosphere. Through layered surfaces, fractured structures, and materially charged environments, she approaches matter itself as a carrier of emotional and historical memory.
Her practice draws upon Veneto’s long artistic and architectural lineage—from the atmospheric painting of Giorgione, Titian, and Jacopo Bassano to the material sensitivity of Carlo Scarpa and the structural thinking of Andrea Palladio—while simultaneously engaging contemporary questions surrounding industrialization, identity, ecological fragility, and systems of production.
Central to her work is an ongoing engagement with the historic ceramic town of Nove. Returning nearly seventy years after her grandparents emigrated from Italy to Canada, Basso Pietrobon began working with abandoned plaster molds and local artisans to create Break the Mold, a body of sculptural works that reimagines traditions of ceramic production through hand alteration, collapse, and material disruption. Rather than producing identical forms, each piece is manipulated while fragile, embracing irregularity, vulnerability, and transformation. The project also functions as a broader social initiative, helping support local artisans and preserve ceramic knowledge within the region.
Across projects such as Brick Block, Tick Tock, Sow, Sew and So, and The Fondamenta, Basso Pietrobon connects material experimentation with broader social and ecological concerns, addressing themes including gender-based violence, sustainability, labor, and the disappearance of regional craft traditions. Her works frequently oscillate between personal narrative and collective memory, archaeology and future construction, intimacy and monumentality.
Whether through painting, sculpture, light, or performance, Basso Pietrobon’s practice seeks to create spaces that hold tension, vulnerability, and transformation—works that emerge not simply as images or objects, but as living material environments shaped by time, atmosphere, and human experience.
Places & Lineages