I am Every Woman
From 10/12/2024 To 24/01/2025
I'm every woman, it's all in me
I can read your thoughts right now
Every one from A to Z
Chaka Khan, 1978
At a time of great debates dedicated to gender issues, the De Chirico gallery dedicates the final exhibition of the year to the female figure and its many and complex facets. It is neither intended to be a manifesto nor a gender claim: it is an attempt, through images, to compose stories. Many photographers on display, of different ages and backgrounds, for a project that aims to be inclusive and free of judgment, allowing individual personalities to emerge.
Two young photographers from Turin, April (Turin, 2001) and Marta Scavone (Turin, 1998) take us back to the recent pandemic: the first with the shot Divagazioni in the time of Covid portrays her sister trying to rediscover the sense of lightness within the walls of her home who seemed lost; the face emerges from the water and appears suspended and ethereal in a moment of great uncertainty and restlessness. Marta Scavone, self-portraits in the shot Gloves from the Moda Pandemica cycle (2020): through market research, the artist identified the twelve most requested items and used them in the creation of clothes and accessories with which she self-portraited in theatrical poses. The shot by Alessandra Cavassa (Savona, 1974) is also from 2020, Looking at the future: the period is also pandemic but the image is that of her daughter, a teenager intent on looking at the water in front of herself, portrayed on an Australian beach. It is the gaze of the mother who has mixed feelings towards her daughter's growth and independence and the inevitable, healthy detachment.
A miss is the female image of Alejandro Cartagena (Dominican Republic, 1977), from the Santa Barbara project. Return jobs back to US, one of the photographs that make up the large installation by the Mexican photographer exhibited in Turin at the De Chirico gallery in 2017 and created after a residency in Santa Barbara during Donald Trump's electoral campaign and therefore cyclically current.
The body is certainly a topos of the exhibition, often seen from a male perspective. The English photographer Max Caffell (London, 1974) is on display with a shot from a few years ago in which a naked performer dances in the photographer's studio between plaster casts to which she was subjected (Caffell is also a sculptor); a young woman in a bikini smiles at us in the shot by Melissa Steckbauer (Tucson, 1980). The young photographer Federico Mastropietro (Turin, 1996) with La notte and a title of Antonian memory (the studies on cinema and cinematographic language are evident), tells of a precise moment: "This photo is an example of reality that breaks its own substrate and reaches the intelligible dimension of the sublime. One of those perfect scenes that a person can casually witness but can causally stop forever."
The BDSM nudes of Araki (Tokyo, 1940), a work on paper with the skilful use of the recent blue inks of Paolo Leonardo (Turin, 1973) and a disturbing image of the leader Jan Saudek (Prague, 1935) transports the visitor into a explicitly erotic dimension while, on the contrary, the women of stone by Paolo Noris (Milan, 1964) and Börje Tobiasson (Tingsas, 1952) completely overturn his vision, telling about money and death. Noris portrays the Dèa argentum, (the goddess of money) or the mythological sculpture by Giuseppe Maretto Palazzo Lancia in Piazza Affari in Milan, an office building in Rationalist style by the architect Emilio Lancia, in front of the Stock Exchange. A sculpture from behind, at the Staglieno cemetery, is the female figure of Tobiasson, one of the shots of the full-bodied project that the Swedish photographer dedicated to the Genoese cemetery.
With the shot Il peso della luce Francesco Fredella (Sant’Agata di Puglia, 1971) explores the face as a map of resistance and mystery. Leather and stone merge, evoking the passage of time. It is a dialogue between presence and absence, immersed in a light that weighs as much as the shadow; Nico Mingozzi (Portomaggiore, 1976) has accustomed us to merciless and sometimes cruel distortions of austere figures from the early 1900s: mothers, wives and daughters reconstructed with paint, drawing, scissors and sometimes drops of the artist's blood.
From the body of work War on Breast Cancer, a project commissioned by Samsung to the photojournalist Manu Brabo (Zaragoza, 1982) for war photographers on the topic of breast cancer, a sad and wonderful shot of a woman in the mirror with the obvious sign of baldness due to the chemo she is busy putting on a headgear.
Two icons of the past, Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth are the subjects of Alison Jackson (London, 1960), the English photographer who has been working with lookalikes for decades, two photographs from the long-standing Private project. Still within the context of the magnificent illusion that photography (and all art) can sometimes be, an image created by Matteo Procaccioli della Valle (Jesi, 1983) with the use of Artificial Intelligence. The print, whose subject is a sexy, tattooed and corpulent Asian woman, is a preview of the entire project which will be exhibited at the Raffaella De Chirico gallery at the end of January.