Farfalle

The golden bow-tie shape at the center of this Ana Inciardi mini print is immediately recognizable as a single piece of farfalle pasta, rendered in warm yellow against a clean white ground. The pasta is depicted from straight on, with its characteristic pinched waist, ruffled zigzag edges, and the subtle fold lines that radiate outward from the center knot. The composition is spare, placing the subject centrally with generous white space on all sides and the handwritten title "Farfalle" in the lower left corner.

Farfalle, whose name comes from the Italian word for butterflies, is a short pasta shape with origins in northern Italy, particularly the Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions. Its distinctive form is made by pinching a flat rectangle of dough at the center, producing the winged silhouette shown here. Collectors drawn to food subjects find this print satisfying precisely because Inciardi treats a humble, familiar object with the same compositional attention she gives to any other subject.

The golden palette gives the pasta a slightly luminous quality without tipping into decorative excess. As a food print, it fits naturally alongside her other culinary subjects, and collectors frequently group it with those pieces to build a cohesive kitchen or dining room arrangement. The handwritten label adds a personal, almost sketchbook quality that is consistent across her catalog, giving individual prints a sense of belonging to a larger, thoughtfully assembled body of work.