Margherita Zapf’s work opens onto the world of La Tribe: an imagined community of warrior women who have reclaimed the Earth and now live in close relation to nature, ritual and one another. Across painting and sculpture, Zapf builds a symbolic universe of bodies, weapons, animals and natural forms, where power is not only shown through force, but through alertness, care, play and control.
Her warriors are guardians of a hard-won peace. They know that danger has not disappeared, but they are not defined by fear. In It Strikes the Heart Without a Trace, a figure sits in the grass with her dagger resting nearby. Her body is turned away, relaxed and unguarded, yet, the blade changes the atmosphere of the scene. It suggests that readiness has become part of her body, almost instinctive. Rest, here, is not a weakness. It is the calm of someone who knows what she is capable of.
A different energy runs through We Will Learn to Rely on Our Swords. The warrior is active now, moving with her weapon in a scene that feels part training, part game. The sword points toward the body, sharp and vertical, but it does not wound. The figure avoids it with ease, bending away with agility and control. The work holds a charged tension between danger and pleasure, threat and trust. The weapon may appear to set the challenge, but the body sets the terms.
In A Serpent of Leather, a Tension of Braid, the body disappears and the weapon takes centre stage. A leather whip cuts through the grass like a snake: sinuous, alert, full of suggestion. It is both an object of force and a symbol of knowledge, discipline and command. From the myth of the Amazon to contemporary images of domination, the whip carries a long and complex history. Zapf uses it to explore power as something negotiated through tension: between softness and threat, seduction and control, the feminine and the masculine.
Together, these works present a world in which strength is never simple. Zapf’s warriors are not invulnerable icons. They rest, train, desire, defend and test the limits of their own power. Their weapons are not only tools of violence, but extensions of awareness: signs of a peace that must be protected, and of a freedom that has been claimed rather than granted.
Margherita Zapf (b. 1991) is an Italian multidisciplinary artist working across painting and sculpture, who lives and works in Milan. She studied Media Design and Multimedia Arts at NABA, graduating in 2014, and later completed an MA in Communication for Cultural Heritage at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Since 2020, her practice has drawn increasingly on anthropology, esoteric traditions and ancient ritual, shaping a visual language that feels both mythical and direct.
Text by Maria Myasnikova