From October 2 to December 21, 2024, M77 opens to the public Giosetta Fioroni. Speculum, a monographic exhibition showcasing the work of renowned artist Giosetta Fioroni. The project is curated by Cristiana Perrella and produced in collaboration with the Goffredo Parise and Giosetta Fioroni Foundation as well as the artist herself.
The exhibition, which features around 50 works, traces the entire span of the artist’s long career, born in Rome in 1932, through the theme of the gaze and the representation of female otherness.
The title references Luce Irigaray’s famous 1974 essay, Speculum. The Other Woman, where the author states women’s need to represent and narrate the female world on the basis of their own parameters and not as a reflected image of a typically male reference model.
As the curator explains, Speculum is the concave mirror that deforms and does not reflect a copy conform to the original model, but instead channels the light and illuminates the deepest sense of femininity in all its diversity. While bereft of militant overtones, Fioroni’s work has always affirmed this difference and the freedom that comes along with it: “I have focused a lot not on feminism but on femininity,” the artist has been quick to point out on several occasions. Hers is a self-determined femininity, one lying beyond the canons set by social convention, which are indeed deconstructed and criticized with irony, like in her famous performative installation La spia ottica, (“The Optical Spy”) (1968), where a young woman in her room (the artist’s alter ego) is observed by viewers through a peephole as she goes about her activities.
