Installation view of Luxembourg + Co., Stand D3 at Frieze Masters 2021. Courtesy Luxembourg + Co., London and New York. Photo: Damian Griffiths Photography.
FRIEZE MASTERS
Booth D3
The Regent's Park
London, NW1 4NR
October 13-17, 2021
Giosetta Fioroni (b. 1932, Rome) is considered one of the most important figures in Italian painting of the post-war era. Her work is commonly associated with the Roman group ‘Scuola Piazza del Popolo’, which also included Mario Schifano, Tano Festa and Franco Angeli among others, as well as more broadly with the advent of Pop Art in Italy. Yet Fioroni’s practice differs from that of her immediate contemporaries, as well as the overarching notion of Pop as it came to be understood in the English-speaking world. The distinction is most clearly pronounced in her persistent exploration of femininity based on her personal experience and interpretation of this category in popular culture. “I have worked a lot, not on feminism but on femininity”, she once explained. “I would like to maintain a distinction. In a period of lively feminism, I was interested in the look, in the atmosphere tied to femininity.” Fioroni’s portraits of women from the 1960s focus on familiar expressions of interpersonal exchange characteristic of the photographic representation of young actresses and models in the mass media. While many of these portraits were realised initially as photographs in an attempt to communicate a sense of seduction or vulnerability, or even the attempted erasure of emotional expression altogether, Fioroni’s paintings of these photographic sources venture to redeem something of the person depicted. They capture, in her words, “passing emotions”, moments when “a detail, a gesture, or a look in the eye” reveals the distance created by mechanisms of enhanced visibility, and thus compensate for the ephemeral nature of the photographic, projected or painted encounter.
The present display forms an extension to a larger exhibition, currently on view at Luxembourg + Co. gallery on 2 Savile Row, Mayfair.