The exhibition, Giosetta Fioroni. Rome in the 60s, curated by Marco Meneguzzo, Piero Mascitti and Elettra Bottazzi (Giosetta Fioroni Archive), in collaboration with the Rocco Guglielmo Foundation, the Provincial Administration of Catanzaro, the Zoli Foundation, the Spirale d'Idee cultural association and the The Accademia Cultural Association traces the early years of the Roman artist's career through seventy canvases and silver papers created between the XNUMXs and early XNUMXs, crucial moments of her inspiration.
The exhibition itinerary is also full of documents from the Fioroni Archive, such as the sketches of "La Spia Ottica", a performance that inaugurated the Festival Il Teatro delle Mostre in 1968, the drawings of the stage costumes for the opera Carmen, directed by Alberto Arbasino in 1967 for the Teatro Comunale of Bologna, the Super8 and 16mm films of 1967, the illustrations for the book covers.
"The Giosetta Fioroni exhibition - says Rocco Guglielmo, artistic director of MARCA - celebrates one of the most important female artists of the twentieth century and is part of the broader project to enhance the Museum, which will lead it to consolidate its position among the most active realities of southern Italy and of the whole nation”.
"With this initiative, of great historical-scientific value, the MARCA Museum - continues Rocco Guglielmo - intends to forge new collaborations with Italian and international cultural institutions".
The review opens with the works produced between the end of 1950 and the beginning of the following decade, characterized by that extreme lightness and freshness of tones that will also return in later moments of Giosetta Fioroni's artistic career. Works such as Galeon (1959), The secret in action (1959-1960), Laguna (1960), Interior with red arrow (1960), The light bulb (1960), L'amour (1962), Familiar interior (1963), L The Clock (1963) is an apparently indistinct accumulation of simple and very colorful objects, images, symbols, be they hearts, lips, fragments of words, numbers, on an almost flat background that forces them into a close relationship.
The turning point in his figuration took place between 1963 and 1964, the date of his participation in the Venice Biennale, which went down in history as the "Biennale della Pop", where his work directly confronts those of Roman artists such as Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, Titina Maselli, Mario Schifano, leaders of a cultural climate that will take the name of "Roman Pop" and which saw her, right from the start, as the absolute protagonist.
The composition, for at least five years, is structured according to clear, almost didactic trends: there is no longer the accumulation of signs and images as on a wall, when one perceives the appearance of photograms, placed side by side and superimposed - as in Cosmetics, of 1963-1964, which marks the start of this period – or the juxtaposed canvases that reinforce the sense of sequence, of narration, of development over time, as in The Nightmare (1964), TV Girl (1964 ), Double Liberty (1964-1965), Villa R (1965), Girl in Villa R (1965) or in the portrait of Goffredo Parise, the writer from Vicenza who became his life partner for over twenty years.
In this phase, Giosetta Fioroni takes on the silver color as a distinctive feature that will characterize her works between 1964 and 1967. These are years in which she experiments with new subjects and in which the wind of protest leads her to address political issues that creep through the size of personal memory.
The images that now interest her, in the two-year period 1967-1968, come from photographs that concern her, or that pertain to the period of her childhood or to the historical one in which she developed, marked by the fascist regime: often they are children or young people regimented, as in Child alone (1968) or in Obedience (1969), or of herself as a girl, as in Self-portrait at nine years old (1966), in which the more strictly historical-political aspect is superimposed on the psychological one of a fragile and fundamental age, which has always interested her.
This 'committed' side of Giosetta Fioroni addresses the anthropology, psychology and sociology of childhood, starting with the fairy tale to which she will dedicate a large cycle - The Guardian of the Geese (1969), Sleeping Beauty: Rosaspina (1969-1970) – which will extend until the seventies.
The decade and the exhibition path ideally close with Big arrow indicating the house in the country. It is a work that marks his abandonment to the worldliness that had characterized his life until then. In fact, with Goffredo Parise he decided to leave Rome to retire to Salgareda, a tiny fraction of a small town on the Piave. In the work, a very small house on the horizon is highlighted by a gigantic signal arrow, almost a comet star above its new hut, as if both were saying: "We are here, and for now we intend to stay there".
The exhibition is accompanied by an important monograph (Silvana Editoriale) which presents a critical essay by Marco Meneguzzo, an interview by Elettra Bottazzi with Giosetta Fioroni which retraces the artist's creative adventure in the sixties, and historical documents, some of which unpublished, the result of research conducted by the Giosetta Fioroni Archive.
