At the Central Institute for Graphics the graphic production of women artists from the 20th century to the present day

From May 17 to July 23, 2023 at theCentral Institute for Graphics, in the Palazzo della Calcografia, the exhibition Women Artists. Paths in Graphics from the 20th Century to the Present, curated by Luisa De Marinis and Ilaria Fiumi Sermattei. Promoted and organized by the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, the exhibition is dedicated to the graphic production of women artists in the Institute’s collection, with the intention of tracing the paths of expressive research, starting from the first decades of the twentieth century until today.

In addition to the forty women artists selected, about eighty works on display from the collections of the Calcografia, the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints, the contemporary art section and the photographic collections of the Institute, the exhibition also showcases works by women artists not yet in the collection, but highly significant within the contemporary art scene, such as Irma Blank, Isabella Ducrot and Elisa Montessori.

The exhibition is organized around five themes-Myths/Visions, Landscapes, Faces/Figures, Signs/Writings and About Her-in a path in which chronological and historical criteria are intertwined with linguistic and thematic ones, testifying to women’s adherence to the currents and movements of art history over the long period analyzed.

As the curators of the exhibition explain, “At the beginning of the twentieth century, a significant presence of women artists can be detected in the Italian art scene, participants in the coeval expressive research of the beginning of the century and fully included in the system of production and the market. The outcomes of this activity appear particularly qualified but are taken up to an extremely small extent by the government’s policy of acquisitions for public collections of graphic art, signifying their slow recognition by society. Until the post-World War II period, the lines of expressive research did not deviate from the contemporary panorama, concentrated on various experiences, both abstract and figurative, which were later joined by themes related to reflection on the role of women, which gradually developed in the wake of the instances of feminism between the 1960s and 1970s: an awareness that invested themes and languages, creating new lines of research, alive and active even today.”

The work of the three invited artists, all born in the 1930s, fits into this path: the zero degree of aniconic writing of Irma Blank, the material and textile compositions, conceptually conceived by Isabella Ducrot, the poetic inspirations, poised between myth and nature in the drawings of Elisa Montessori.

“The women in our collections, graphic, etching and photographic, reveal themselves throughout the 20th century, until today, as sensitive, up-to-date and imaginative authors,” stressed Maura Picciau, director of the Central Institute for Graphics. “Discovering, or rediscovering, their works and message is a due act and an exploration full of surprises and satisfactions, sometimes touching. Sometimes the official history has hidden its bearing, we are pleased to offer the public an unprecedented review of high artistic quality. The three invited artists, Irma Blank, Isabella Ducrot and Elisa Montessori, constitute a happy triad in terms of analytical ability, poetic harmony and expressive force in the sign. The presence of works by Irma Blank, who recently passed away, moves us and seems a fitting tribute.”

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Image: Irma Blank, Radical Writings, From the Book of Silence III (1983; watercolor on paper)

At the Central Institute for Graphics the graphic production of women artists from the 20th century to the present day

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