The Restoration Exhibition

The photo belongs to the period of when Dora Maar was the most active and recognised as a surrealist photographer. Bound to the Parisian art scene by close friends and sentimental relationships – photographer, painter and model, she was Pablo Picasso’s partner for several years – Dora Maar introduced an eccentric approach to surrealist poetry.

The Statue de femme photograph portrays a female bust, likely a figurehead, captured from an unusual top perspective. By subverting the horizontal and vertical plane, a pier and a mass of water that cannot be better identified stand out in the background. The shadows on the hair, on the face, on the muscles and on the breasts of the statue accentuate an illusory effect that muddles sculpture and flesh, living body and immobile form, obscene dream and immediate reality.

A thread joins three women, three generations, three countries of origin by their mouth. The artist, her mother on her right, her daughter to her left. Italy, Ecuador, Brazil. A recurring element in Anna Maria Maiolino's poetry, the mouth becomes a vehicle for powerful and contrasting emotions – love and anger – alluding to the chance of words, and personifies the threshold between physical and spiritual relationships in the body.

The thread that binds the three women tells of a connection to time that is both visceral and political, which plunges into the story of the self and naturally takes shape in the relationship with the other. Fotopoemação reflects on the performative and relational nature of identity.

«When the creative gesture is so intense, even lacerating as that of Germaine Richier, it is difficult not to speak of cruel art». This is how a contemporary critic describes the French artist. A pupil of Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, friend and colleague of Marino Marini, Massimo Campigli and Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier reached her full artistic maturity between the 40s and 50s.

L’Orco fully embodies her expressive style, starting from her favourite material – bronze – up to the themes of aesthetic research: plastic bodies immersed in nature, transformation of matter, hybridisation between man, animal and supernatural. In her relentless confrontation with Nature, Richier learns to «read a form, to see forms», she grants a restless and nervous rhythm to the sculptural material and gives voice to the power of transformation not through the poetics of dreams, but through a vicious and rough, threatening and disturbing realism that shocked the political class of her time. Hers is a passionate and painful production that reveals an indefinable era.

Claude Cahun (born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in 1894) was a French artist and writer, interested in exploring such topics as gender and sexuality as early as the 1920s. In her works, often created in collaboration with her partner (Marcel Moore, born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe), the artist questions and protests gender and sexual norms, often through the form of a photographic self-portrait.

The artist’s interest in photomontage stems from her collaboration with such Surrealist artists as Breton and Bataille. Le char du couronement II, part of the Arthur Schwarz Donation, is an abstract composition which includes triangular elements, sharp glass pieces. The work explores a typically Surrealist and oneiric topic of the play between visible and the invisible, real and imaginary.

Marianna Candidi Dionigi, born in Rome in 1756, was an Italian painter and writer who studied and explored archaeology and landscape in her writings and paintings. Dionigi wrote a monograph in which she reflected on painting and described monuments she came across during her journeys around Lazio.

L'Aniene presso Tivoli is an exquisite example of neoclassic landscape, characterised by the presence of natural elements and monuments. The presence of a human figure in the idyllic pastoral setting is a key characteristic of paintings by Marianna Dionigi.

Ketty La Rocca, born in 1938, was an Italian artist during the 1960s and 70s. A leading exponent of visual poetry, she was part of Gruppo 70. In her works the artist often reflected on the position of a woman as a subaltern subject in a patriarchal society. The work Apollo and Daphne (1974) is part of the series Riduzioni (Reductions), which she started in 1973.

This work in particular presents graphical elaborations that interpret and modify the reproduction of Bernini’s sculpture Apollo and Daphne. Contours initially consist of the artist’s manifesto “dal momento in cui (the moment when)”, and the word “you”, and the last version brings to a radical graphic schematisation of the original photograph. Through seriality and schematisation, the use of words and lines, the artist creates her own subjective interpretation of the canonical image.

Cesarina Gualino, born in 1890, was an arts patron, collector, dancer and painter. Born Gurgo Salice, at the age of seventeen the artist married Riccardo Gualino, an important Italian manufacturer. Under the guidance of the art historian Lionello Venturi and the painter Felice Casorati, Cesarina Gualino together with her husband managed to create an incredible art collection, including works by Giotto, Cimabue, Botticelli, Tiziano and Veronese.

Cesarina Gualino also studied “danza libera”, under the guidance of the legendary ballerina Bella Hutter, and started painting later on, creating mostly still lifes and landscapes. The artist became famous for the most original and modern approach to composition and subject matter. The work from 1932 is a portrait of the artist’s husband Riccardo Gualino.