Wilhelmina Merante + Leyla Riggio is an artist duo based in Milan. After more than a decade of collaboration across various projects and identities (Dafne, BB5000, The Garden), they formalized their joint practice in 2025. Their work spans sculpture, painting, and multimedia, with a consistent focus on the relationship between form, material, and symbolic resonance.

Their practice investigates how matter can embody concepts of collective experience, emotional weight, and spiritual presence. Materials such as metal and wood are approached not only for their physical properties, but as vessels of cultural, historical, and affective significance. Their works often emerge through processes of repetition, tension, and variation producing forms that oscillate between structural clarity and poetic suggestion. Their artistic language is both restrained and evocative, drawing on craft traditions, architectural references, and abstract symbolism. 




info@meranteriggio.com
Instagram

METAL PAINTINGS
Metal Paintings is a series of works developed through a modular system based on a 5x5 cm grid, used to shape images by subtracting from a continuous metallic surface. The compositions emerge as precise traces, defined through shifting proportions and calibrated spacing.

The series draws upon the stark geometry of surgical procedures and the melancholic atmosphere of graveyard poetry, bringing together an austere visual language and a deep sense of personal symbolism. In this synthesis of brutal structure and emotional resonance, the works reflect an enduring pursuit of purity, echoing the clarity of synthetism and the permanence of timeless signs.




Metal painting 5 - A rectified planisphere - Constructed with a 5×5 cm modular grid, 2025 
Aluminum
255 X 135 X 4 cm 
Metal painting 1 - A gated cross - Constructed with a 5×5 cm modular grid, 2025 
Corten steel
135 X 155 X 4 cm 
Metal painting 2 - A red cross - Constructed with a 5×5 cm modular grid, 2025 
Corten steel
115 X 115 X 4 cm 
Metal painting 3 - A medium shot of a skeleton - Constructed with a 5×5 cm modular grid, 2025 
Aluminum
75 X 155 X 4 cm
Metal painting 4 - A rectified ribcage - Constructed with a 5×5 cm modular grid, 2025 
Aluminum
75 X 155 X 4 cm