Ketty La Rocca: Has the metaphor worn itself out?

12 Jun-16 Oct 2022

Overview

Ketty La Rocca was associated with the poesia visiva (visual poetry) movement and the avant-garde activities of the Florentine Gruppo 70 and began making subversive visual-verbal collages in the 1960s, cutting and pasting images together with short text clippings. One of La Rocca’s aims was to liberate the depiction of women from its contemporary context, both in patriarchal Italy of the 1960s and in the general flood of consumer imagery emanating from television, advertising, and the cinema. Her early collage works mimic and undermine the commercial imagery of the day. She presents texts in the style of advertising slogans and media propaganda, subverting their meaning through a play on words that draws out their ambiguities, and elaborates her ideas through the pairing of such texts with images drawn from popular magazines and newspapers. These works were calls to become politically aware, to resist the exploitation of the female body and the political and clerical manipulation played out in the media at the time. She articulated these themes in her poetry which has been translated in collaboration with the Ketty La Rocca Estate. This online exhibition presents some of key collage works alongside poetry written between 1964 - 1975, celebrating La Rocca's unique and subversive voice.

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Amanda Wilkinson Gallery will present the performaces Veline, 1967 and In principio erat verbum, 1970-72 on Friday 8 July 2022 as part of Performance Exchange. A solo exhibition of Ketty La Rocca's work will open on Wednesday 13 September 2022.

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