The capacious white central gallery is filled with a medley of artworks that at first glance seem to have no apparent connection. Sculptures, photographs, paintings and ceramics are distributed evenly on the walls and floor. Eventually it becomes clear all of these works are made by women and that is when the exhibition title ‘Io Dico Io / I Say I” comes into focus. This celebratory exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Rome has delved into its collection in order to bring to the fore women artists. Each speaks with their own voice with their own poetics, thus the heterogeneity of works on display falls into place.
Installation view, Io dico Io – I say I, Galleria Nazionale.
Carla Accardi, better known for abstract painting, has a work, “Origine” (1976-2007), where she uses sicofoil, a commercial plastic, which she first incorporated in her practice during the 1960s as the framing device for a number of small photographs of women in her family. This intimate mash up of formal moves she deploys in her paintings combined with personal images epitomizes the approach of many of the artists on view. It is at the antipodes of the heroic muscular male-dominated art modes most often represented in modern Italian art history.
Monica Bonvicini, Fleurs du Mal (pink), 2019 (detail). Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano © Monica Bonvicini and VG Bild-Kunst.
Monica Bonvicini’s 2019 sculpture “Fleurs du Mal (pink)” displays pink hand-blown glass objects hanging from hooks on a steel structure reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (1914). Congruent with an earlier version of this sculpture where transparent hand-blown penises are draped over the hooks, the artist humorously takes an icon of a decidedly phallocentric art practice to task.
As the viewer makes their way through the extensive exhibit, enjoying each on their own terms even as they may discover the resonances that are established by proximity, one eventually winds their way upstairs where they encounter the extensive archive of Carla Lonzi. The activist critic was the first to organize and sort art made by women from the specifically personal point of view and in terms of self-portraiture that effectively point to how historical gender occlusions can in fact be addressed. Curators Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini, with poise and adroitness, bring deserved attention to these women artists that are finally being recognized as part of the historical canons.
curated by Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
March 1, 2021 – June 6, 2021
All photos by Alessandro Garofalo.
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