Curated by Valérie Da Costa
with Carla Accardi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Marisa Merz, Cinzia Ruggeri

Scenography by Maria Magdalena David, Illona Rougemond-Mosconi

Join us for the opening on Friday, March 28, at 6:00 pm.

The exhibition Women are Beautiful brings together four Italian female artists of different generations, working in Milan, Rome and Turin. Their work has traversed and made a significant impact on Italian art from the second half of the 20^th century through to today, offering a reflexion on painting, sculpture and design. 

With the aim of showing the singularity of their work, the exhibition proposes an introduction to how women artists in Italy viewed art in the period between the 1960s (in the case of more historical pieces – Carla Accardi’s paintings) and 2010s (in the case of more recent works by Marisa Merz and Nathalie Du Pasquier), without forgetting Cinzia Ruggeri, who was active primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. 

While I don’t usually make it a habit to use English-language titles, Women are Beautiful immediately presented itself as an assertive statement to highlight the creative power of women. A power that has, until recently, been little considered and one that we still continue to (re)discover. 

The exhibition title also brings to mind the pictorial environment created in 1992 by artist Tania Mouraud for the patio of the School of Fine Arts in Tourcoing. Bearing the same name, the work consisted of a single phrase (Woman is Beautiful) written on the ground in drawn-out fluorescent letters, making it impossible to read. It was accompanied by the names of women artists from the historical avant-garde (Werefkin, Rozanova, Goncharova, Stepanova…) written legibly above the patio arches, a radical manner of paying homage to those modern artists who had been forgotten. 

Women are Beautiful opens with Carla Accardi (1924-2014) and roots itself in her pictorial research. A central figure of Italian abstraction, Carla Accardi was active in Rome from the late 1940s.

Close to the group Forma 1, where she was the sole female, she created an abstraction made up of coloured signs. In the mid-1960s, she went from working on canvas to Sicofoil. While painting with fluorescent colours on this transparent plastic, she reconsidered not only the pictorial surface but painting’s relationship to space. As well as painting, she made habitable installations, such as the Tende [Tent] series that she began in the 1960s, or Ambiente Arancio [Orange Environment] (1966-68). 

Marisa Merz (1926-2019), her contemporary, was working in Turin from the 1960s onwards. In her work, she revisited gestures that were associated with femininity (knitting, sewing) but used industrial materials (aluminium, copper) which she reappropriated for artistic purposes. In this manner, she gave shape to cocoons made out of aluminium sheets or canvases from copper threads. She is the only woman to have been part of Arte Povera in its nascent moment in the late 1960s.

Starting from the 1980s, her work changed direction. She took an interest in faces, a subject that for her became all-encompassing and allowed Marisa Merz to represent any which kind of face. Over the course of the next few decades, she would tirelessly draw, paint and sculpt faces, even allowing them to appear as part of her thoughts, in the form of aphorisms:

“È un volto ma il suo apparire è attraverso spazi luoghi di geometria – confini di rilievi – vuoti luminosi – punti di incontri distanti tra ma coincidenti per – ” (“It is a face but its appearance is through spaces places of geometry – boundaries of reliefs – luminous voids – points of encounters that are distant between but coincidental for –“) [Marisa Merz, LaM-Fonds Mercator, Lille-Bruxelles, 2024, np.]

Several drawings and paintings, as well as one sculpture (a small head mounted on a tripod), have been grouped together in one gallery that has been plunged into darkness. This black box invites us to enter an intimate space that contains works whose subject matter is the representation of the body. 

Marisa Merz’s work sits in dialogue with Colombra (1990), a padded fabric chaise longue by Cinzia Ruggeri (1942-2019), representing a stylised, elongated body, and which sits somewhere in between a non-functional artwork and a functional object. 

A fashion designer for Bloom, the women’s clothing brand that she created in the early 1970s, Cinzia Ruggeri also collaborated during the 1980s with Studio Alchimia and the designer Alessandro Mendini. Circumventing the idea that an object or clothing should be functional, Ruggeri’s pieces oscillate joyfully and humorously across “disciplines” (art, design, fashion) and refuse all categorisation, all the better do take pleasure in their own porosity. In this way, a pair of boots are shaped like Italy (Stivali Italia, 1986-2018), and a dress like a ziggurat (Abito ziggurat, 1984-85). 

“Non ritengo che ci siano confini tra le cose che ci circondano. Mi interessa l’abito quando lo spazzolino da denti e la pentola… Dove c’è qualcosa che mi annoia mi viene il desiderio di modificarlo. Vorrei sempre aggiungere un’emozione all’oggetto. Ho sempre voluto fare l’artista, poi piano mi è venuta la voglia di applicare l’arte a tutto quello che potevo.” (“I don’t think there are boundaries between the things around us. I am as interested in dresses as I am in toothbrushes or pots… Where there is something that bores me, I have a desire to change it. I would like to add emotion to every object. I always wanted to be an artist, then gradually I got an urge to apply art to everything I could.”) [Anna Lombardi, Cinzia Ruggeri, Juliet, n°36, avril-mai 1988, p. 36.]

The exhibition closes with paintings and sculptures by Nathalie Du Pasquier (born in 1957), a member of Memphis, the group created by Ettore Sottsass in 1981, that profoundly impacted design through its shapes, materials and colours. For Memphis, Nathalie du Pasquier created numerous textile patterns, furniture and objects. While she never abandoned drawing, it is only in 1987 that painting entered her practice. Constantly evolving, and often adopting still life as its primary subject matter, over the years it has developed into, what we could call, a clear and focused study of perspective. The perspective points that appear in her still lives of objects are not without recalling the 1920s purist compositions of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, or some artists of the New Objectivity, their contemporaries, who also sought to render painting more easily legible.

Since then, the motifs in Nathalie Du Pasquier’s canvases have become more colourful and geometric, and together with sculptural assemblages made from pieces of painted wood, they share this same aesthetic belonging to an architecturally constructed painting. The exhibition presents the development of her painting practice from the early 2000s to the late 2010s, bringing us full circle from the abstraction of Carla Accardi to that of Nathalie Du Pasquier. 

The exhibition design has been created by two young designers: Illona Rougemond-Mosconi and Maria-Magdalena David, both of whom are graduates of the School of Fine Art and Scenography-Pavillon Bosio in Monaco. Their minimal and elegant proposal toys with transparencies, creates a rhythm in the exhibition space and offers a different perspective on certain paintings and sculptures by Carla Accardi, Marisa Merz and Nathalie Du Pasquier. 

BIOGRAPHY NOTES

Valérie Da Costa is an art historian, art critic and curator. She is Professor in History of Contemporary Art at the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis. She has written extensively on Italian art and has curated numerous exhibitions. Her most recent writing and curatorial projects include Paul Thek in Italy 1962-1976 (Les presses du réel, 2022); Vita Nuova. New Challenges for Art in Italy 1960-1975 (MAMAC, Nice, 2022); and Paul Thek (MAMCO, Geneva, 2024).
She is the curator of the exhibition Claire Vasarely : une vie dans la couleur (Fondation Vasarely, Aix en Provence, 14 June 2025-15 February 2026)

Carla Accardi (1924-2014), Italian painter working in Rome.
Nathalie Du Pasquier (born in 1957), French artist and designer working in Milan.
Marisa Merz (1926-2019), Italian artist working in Turin.
Cinzia Ruggeri (1942-2019), Italian artist and designer working in Milan.